Jade
by CoolCoke
Summary: Sixteen-year-old Jade Brooks plays a dangerous game of cat and mouse with both authorities and criminals after her. Neal tries to con himself into her inner circle, but none of them has any idea how close they really are. Set mid-season 4. Neal and OC and small apperances of the other characters we know and love.
1. Chapter 1

**So proud of myself now, I ACTUALLY FINISHED SOMETHING LONGER THAN A CHAPTER! So this has been something I've been working on for longer than a year now, and I'M FINALLY FINISHED! It all starts up in an alternative universe (it's a fanfic DUH!) where Papa Caffrey doesn't show up, and Sam is never a thing. So somewhere out in 4****th**** season, after Ellen's death.**

**Disclaimer. I don't own White Collar, its characters or anything else associated with the show 'n all that.**

**Oh, and English is my second language, sorry for mistakes in advance (if there are things that repeat themselves, you can tell me and I can probably change it up for the next part)**

Chapter 1 - Jade

It had been roughly fifteen years since Daniel left. Less roughly, it had been fourteen years, eleven months, a week and three days. Jade knew, because she had his birth certificate in her hand, and he had disappeared on his eighteenth birthday. Jade knew because she was good with numbers. Jade knew because she had made it her mission to know everything about Daniel Brooks, from the fake paper trail of the first three years of his life, to the mysterious and sophisticated way he disappeared when he turned eighteen.

Jade was one year and two months by then, and had recently managed to add the "Da" in Daniel, something that, strangely, was the cause of sadness to their mother, rather than celebration. Jade didn't understand, but she didn't really understand much by then either. 'Nell, as she called him, could sit down on a room with her, list up several swears, and she would be none the wiser, as she repeated them in front of him, and then in front of Ma and 'Llen. But the little toddler would give them a smooth grin with her tiny milk tooth and believe she was a source of entertainment.

At least 'Llen had the decency to correct Jade before it had grown too much on her. Imagine going to parent support groups and the only thing their kid could say was inappropriate words. Not that Ma would ever take Jade, she was too busy staring out the window, telling the same story whenever Jade would tug in the jeans Ma was wearing, the story about the queen and her prince, who had to flee away from the dragon, but still waited for the king to come, and restore the peace.

Or at least that was what she was told she would do. 'Llen, who had become Ellen over the years, had told Jade about her first years. She was the main source to Jade's childhood, as asking her mother wouldn't get anything else than a teary cheek and more intense staring out the window. Ellen was better at remembering, especially when it came to Jade's brother.

Jade had been very curious when she asked Ellen about the boy in the police hat in the framed picture on her fireplace. Ellen had sat down, with the four year old girl on the lap, and talked about Daniel. She told the whole story, the story including Daniel's father, the arrest, WitSec (which Jade didn't fully understand by then), and why there were people in ties and suits visiting all three of them from time to time. In the end she talked about Jade's father, one of several one night stands Jade's mother had in an attempt to start over.

Ellen also told her to not tell anyone, and Jade swore, "cross my heart and hope to die", "zip it, lock it, throw it away", not to tell anybody, _anybody_, about what Ellen had told her. Not even her mother. But that cross was easy forgotten, and another four years later, Jade had managed to link her mother's only bedtime story with the real story. Absentmindedly, she had one night sat down on the chair on the opposite of her mother's, and asked her mother if she was the queen.

She hadn't seen Ellen since. They moved up to a suburban area outside of Portland, but Ellen wasn't stationed in the house two blocks away when Jade checked. Her mother didn't even bother to try to remember bringing Jade to school, neither did she explain what happened to Jade, when everybody started calling her Karen. It was like living in a nightmare. Karen made friends, Karen became very good in school, while Jade hid inside three cardboard boxes in the attic that she had secretly brought with her, bribing the moving people. Karen often went to the attic, because up there, she was Jade, and Ellen was there too, tucking her into bed, kissing her goodnight.

Karen had to, at all times, remember that she was Karen, not Jade. She learned to use her face, so everybody would believe her when she told them the name, and some friends she made learned her how to slip her fingers into a pocket and pull something out, without the other noticing. When she got caught, Karen would just do the same thing she did with her face when she told them her name. She pretended to be Jade for the seconds she committed a crime, so when they asked her about it, she could be Karen and _technically_ not lie to them. Her mother got frustrated from picking her up at school after phone calls from the principal, and their already unstable relationship was hanging in a thin thread by the start of Karen's teens.

She didn't tell her mother about keeping Jade alive in the attic, creating a driver's license (that didn't start working before Jade was sixteen), a bank account and more for her secret alias. She didn't tell her mother about the tattoo on her shoulder. She didn't tell her mother that she started gymnastics and climbing, and that was why she was so much gone. She didn't talk about the crew of hustlers that taught her to break in to and drive a car, nor did she bother to mention the gun she learned to use, the safes she learned to crack.

But out there, Jade was alive. She was Jade Brooks in the streets, and Karen Oakes in school. Jade plastered a big painting done by Daniel Brooks, her long lost brother, in her attic and imagined her life with him, the boy who was born to be a criminal. He was a role model, and Jade imagined Danny stealing and forging paintings for a living. Karen was oblivious of an older brother, because she didn't have one. Karen was the good girl in school, the girl who probably would end up with a gymnastic scholarship in a whole other edge of the continent, the girl who gave away her lunch money to that kid who had been robbed for his (although she might have an idea where the stolen lunch money was), the perfect little picture of a girl.

Winter in ninth grade for Karen went as smooth as it could, until a single day with ice on the roads, where Jade had been out on shenanigans, and Karen's mother was called to school to pick her up. They brought Karen to the hospital, and let her see her mother. The first day, she was alive, with casts and bandages all over, the next they wouldn't let Karen see her. It didn't take Karen long time to figure it out.

The queen had died waiting for the king.

They sat down with her the day after, and told Karen that she couldn't live alone, that someone was going to take care of her. Karen shook her head, and cried, and hit her mother's doctor, who showed up at the small funeral and didn't understand that he wasn't welcome there. The social worker smiled friendly to Karen, and drove her up to her house, making her get into the depressive place and get whatever she wanted to spare.

After two minutes standing in the doorway of her room, staring at the furniture and mess that was inside, Jade had decided. She managed to get the social worker help her pack up her room, locked her inside, and went up to the attic. Quick and silent like a cat, Jade managed to get every box out of there. She broke into and hotwired the little Toyota the social worker had, and left in the dust, leaving Karen in the locked room with the social worker.

Jade Brooks was alive again, and she felt very alive too. She lay low on a safe house for some weeks, soaring through every file on the remains of her family, Ellen and Daniel. Her mother's papers were burned in the darkest night, after she memorized them, word for word.

But there was one vital thing Jade had forgot about. The car she stole and had placed outside of the safe house was spotted by a cop, and he called in reinforcements. Jade had to secure all the boxes and run away, which she barely managed. She took a plane eastbound, and ran through Detroit, DC and Philadelphia, before ending up in an empty warehouse in Queens, New York. It was a long heat run, but it was worth it. Jade used her Karen alias in Detroit, but changed to Jade in DC, in an attempt to disappear.

It worked. The police that had bothered to follow her all the way from Oregon, lost track of Jade, and was stranded in Detroit. When Jade finally managed to get herself on solid ground in New York, she settled down, and got some contacts, made some new aliases. Karen was replaced with Jenny, Fredrice, Andrea and Winter, all with some ground paperwork, passport, driver's license (for those old enough), forged birth certificate (smuggled into the register), one or two bank accounts and a credit card for the ones over 18. She plastered the red and angry painting Danny had made right before he left in her "bedroom" (a bed pulled into a corner of the warehouse), and went back to her search of the remains of the family she had lost.

If she just could find Ellen, Jade was okay. She could go back to being Jade full-time, and live with Ellen. This was also the reason she picked New York City. Jade remembered vaguely a hushed conversation between the Marshalls behind a door, where they mentioned the Big Apple in the same breath as Ellen. It was the best and only lead she had, so she went with that.

It wasn't easy, aside from the hushed conversation that _might_ had implied that Ellen was here somewhere, Jade had no leads. She was running against US Marshalls, and they were the absolute professionals in hiding people and keeping them hidden. Ellen Parker had no records anywhere, not even the register in the state had for residents, there was no registered driver's license for the name, not even a job application in any government paid jobs had her name. She was one hundred percent disappeared from the earth. Jade's last attempt on finding her had been to soar through the boxes on Daniel again, hoping that if she found him, _maybe _she could find Ellen through him.

Jade tore her eyes from the birth certificate and glanced through the threads she had hanged up and out the window. This attempt hadn't led to anything either. Daniel had appeared out of nowhere as a three year old boy, and disappeared just as sudden, as an eighteen-year-old. The file fell back to the stack she had been soaring through, and Jade drew her hand over her face in an attempt to keep herself awake and focused. Slowly she rubbed first one eye, so the other while thinking. This stupid hunch had gotten her out of her bed at noon, when she was supposed to be resting up from another all-nighter, staking out her next target. After tossing around in her bed for half an hour, Jade had given up on sleep, and gone back to her boxes, this time pulling out files on her long lost, not really remembered brother she had.

So far, nothing. Daniel had a clean record, nothing out of the usual that could tell her anything about who he was, or where he might be. Jade had hit a dead end again. Stupid hunch for getting her here, getting her hopes up. And now, she probably would have problems with getting back to sleep too, because of him. That hunch didn't get her anything, and it would continue nagging her for weeks, until another would take over.

But what if it was right?

Jade wanted to scream out in frustration, hit her head, _anything_ to stop that small annoying voice in her head. What if the hunch was right, and she had just missed it? What if there was something in these files she was missing?

Or something not in these files? Jade picked up the one she had practically thrown away some seconds ago again. Danny had been Danny for fifteen years, but he had been someone else for three years _before _that. Bennett something. But Danny wouldn't want to be called his real name again, after understanding what his father had done. Danny would want to take another name. Danny would've want a name that cut ties with him and his family completely, but Jade knew that getting a new alias was really hard, unless you wanted to take some dead baby's name (Jade highly doubted that Daniel had taken a dead baby's name, imagining him to have the same set of standards as she had).

The name, she though for herself. It wouldn't be his father's, Daniel wouldn't want that. But it could be his mothers. If Danny took his mother's last name, and used the name he was given by birth, he would have a perfect alias that cut ties with his own. But what was that? With a little humor, Jade realized that her mother's maiden name would have been Jade's too. She didn't even know her own last name, something that hadn't bothered her before now. Like when Ellen had talked about her father, this information had just slipped through her mind as unnecessary.

Jade moved down to the bed, still with the file in her hand. She had made no progress today, but she felt like no profit was going to come out if she kept thinking on spare batteries. The hunch had fell down in an acceptable state, and in a couple of hours, she had to case the museum (before stealing from it in about twelve hours) this time in broad daylight. The file was left on the floor next to the bed, and Jade shut the lights. The clock on the floor by the foot of her bed ticked, the only remaining sound in the half-lit room. Jade's dozing brain absently counted the ticks. One… Two…

**We'll get some Neal next time, and SOMETHING ACTUALLY HAPPENING so stay tuned :D (This was more of an introduction than it was plot) I am not sure about my uploading schedule yet, I'm thinking once or twice a week, if I'm able to. The story is finished (ONLY I KNOW HOW IT ENDS MWHAAHAH), but I feel like it's a bit overwhelming if I put up all parts at once.**

**Thanks for reading :D**


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2 - Neal

RIING!

A dizzy and messy head rose up from the pillows, and four fingers ran through the short brown hair. The body turned around in his bed, dug its tired face into the pillows, and reached out a hand in a blind attempt to turn off the alarm clock. Fortunately, Neal Caffrey was an expert in waking up when he was supposed to, and even if he wanted to miss his alarm, he could easily sneak in the idea that he had overslept, or met with someone vital to the case they were working on instead of being at the office.

He wasn't one hundred percent they believed him whenever the last explanation came up. Peter never believed him, that was for sure. But Neal's "what if I said I was working the case" wasn't as convincing as real facts and progress brought to Peter in a nice smile and a cup of latte.

Neal rose from his bed, and blinked heavily. He had a slight head ache from last night (yes it was Wednesday today), but it wasn't _that_ severe, so Neal managed very fine to ignore it. Mozzie had been raiding through his cabinet of fine, expensive, alcoholic drinks _again_ and Neal knew that the only way to not let his whiskey go to waste was to join in on the drinking, although he regretted it this morning.

The alcohol had been necessary, though. Neal's last case had almost brought him back to the big house, again, and Peter seemed fairly exhausted by his CI after the suspect was put in cuffs. It had been one of those off-anklet undercover cons (or stings, if you were Peter), and Neal had managed to get three unplanned miles away from the very obvious surveillance van, along with the suspect, and a nice 20 grand of counterfeit bills, bills Neal had joined in on producing.

Neither did it help that Neal blew Peter's cover in front of the suspect, which caused Peter standing at gunpoint (Neal didn't know it would go that far, he had been _sure_ there was no guns included when they set up the deal), nor that Neal had to double cross the FBI after he realized that Moz had ended up in one of the evidence the FBI was to get from a warrant the next day, nor that he openly tried to steal… Whatever. That wasn't going in the file anyways, so he'd just forget it, just like everyone else did. Or should do. Diana would probably find a way to use this on him someday.

He and Moz had both sat down in a mutual silence and exhaustion, Mozzie had poured, and Neal had emptied. They had known each other for so long, they knew when to talk and what to say. Moz had mentioned the "good old days", Neal had started the speech that would justify him and his actions, and neither of them had really paid attention to what the other said. If the award for most miserable bunch had been awarded right there and then…

Neal blinked heavily again and made his way all the way to the bathroom before he realized he forgot to put on the coffee. He got shampoo in his eyes in the shower, almost missed giving Bugsy breakfast, managed to burn his omelet, and was _this close_ to going out of the apartment without a tie. A _tie_!

When he finally managed to get to work (he had put the Peter-are-probably-not-going-to-give-me-a-ride-today-part in the equation, and left for work half an hour early to make sure he was there in time by walking), the elevator was stuck, the coffee shop mixed up his delivery and got him one decaf, one latte (of course Neal took the decaf for himself, the latte was for Peter, and _of course_ Neal couldn't stand decaf, what was the point of coffee if it wasn't coffee?), and Neal didn't even manage to con the barista into making him a new cup.

Nevertheless, Neal rode the elevator up to floor 21, managed to plaster his confident and positive smile on his face and walk into the White Collar division with no traces of this morning's happenings. They didn't call him one of the world's best con men for nothing.

Peter was waiting upstairs, in his office, and after flipping the fedora off his head and placing it on his desk, Neal walked straight through the bullpen, and up to Peter. He sent small smiles in every direction he could remember the names of, Jones and Diana, Ross (new female transfer from Chicago), Kane and Harrod.

"Good morning Peter," Neal started the conversation just like another day at work, slipped the coffee cup over to Peter, just like any other day. This was the progress he always followed after he had pulled something big, pretending like nothing happened worked the best, he had figured out. When things were like this, Peter didn't want to mention the previous case because of all the off-springs from the FBI handbook, and Neal easily respected that. A mad handler could give fatal results to the CI.

Peter mumbled something that probably was supposed to sound like "good morning," but instead resembled something like "Mrff." He didn't look up from the file in front of him, and Neal sat down in one of the plastic chairs in front of him. He knew that look. "Something interesting?"

Peter's hungry-for-slapping-cuffs-around-someone-look radiated the room when he finally looked up. "Yeah," he said, while giving Neal the open file he just had been studying. "I should probably give you a mortgage fraud after what you pulled last time, but this is too good to pass on."

So Peter did mention it. Neal took the file and absently started a conversation while reading. "We caught him, didn't we?"

"I was this close to not coming home to Elizabeth."

"And I talked them out of it, didn't I?"

"Not the point. You talked them into it too."

Neal cleared his throat, and changed subject, although he could have said very much more to defend himself. "Someone robbed the Burton Gallery?" He smiled greedily. This was home field. The ball was in his court, he had upper hand and so on.

"Two paintings were taken. A Matisse and a Rembrandt."

"I can see that." His smile grew to include some more teeth, while he waited for Peter to say something to him, like he always did, something along the lines of _look at the avoidance of the security cameras _or _the exit strategy is so good_. When it didn't, Neal looked up to see his partner's look at him. Neal knew that look. That look meant do-you-know-something-I-don't-? .

"What?"

Peter sighed, and his expression fell. "Nothing, just… the Burton Gallery, Rembrandt and Mattisse, pretty flawless job…" His words trailed out in a planned stop.

Neal understood where it was going. "Why do you even ask? I have a tracking anklet that can prove I didn't do it."

"An anklet you have been tampering with before."

"To take a Matisse and a Rembrandt? Peter there is a Van Gough there." Neal pretended to be offended. "Besides, I'm reformed, remember?" When his partner continued staring at him, Neal spoke again, "I didn't steal it."

"What about Mozzie?" Peter was not ready to let this go just yet.

"He was with me last night," Neal parried, before turning his attention back to the file. He didn't want to get into the topic that would explain the slight headache he had. "How did they avoid the lasers, though, they are tricky to get around."

Peter seemed fairly enjoyed by this question, so enjoyed that he forgot to bring the previous subject any further. "Take a look at this," he turned around his computer screen, and Neal leant over to see what "this" was. It was a security tape, the numbers in upper right corner told Neal that it was from the night before, and that it was around three am. The rest of the image showed a half lit room with paintings in rows. It was seemingly all quiet there.

Some kind of dust emerged from down in the right, and all the laser grids were suddenly fully visible, as red lines on a map. Seconds later, a person dressed in black followed the smoke. It was a remarkable view. Neal could maybe the names of three of the gymnastic moves he did in there, wheels, backflips, front flips, but there was so much more. A series of controlled jumps, handstands, flips and other almost inhumane things made that person, whoever he was, managed to get him all the way over to the other side, without even coming close to the lasers once.

"That is talent." Neal commented, while the thief, now fiddling with the security around the frame of the first painting. Some seconds later, the painting, with the frame and everything, was taken off the wall. The same procedure followed for the next. The thief pushed the canvas off the frames, rolled them together, and put them in a plastic tube, that could be popped back to take almost no space at all. When he was done, the thief turned around to face the exit, and the cams, and Neal saw something black covering the entire face, except from the mouth and eyes, which were impossible to make out in bad security camera resolution. For just a second, he believed the thief was going to take it off (it was mostly an impulse from Neal's curiosity), but then he did something unexpected. The thief raised his head to the camera and waved his hand at it. Then, he rolled right into the acrobatic show off he had started in, and not enough with that, when he was done with competing (and winning) with the lasers, he stuck out his hand, so the alarm went off, on purpose, before he ran away.

"Wow."

"Right?" Peter smiled at Neal. "You think we're dealing with a professional?"

Neal blinked, still impressed by the show-off he just had gotten. "Yeah. Everything seems perfectly planned, those lasers needed practicing. He has probably spent weeks casing the gallery for the lasers and to clock the guards, both day and night."

"He didn't need to clock the guards." Peter replied, while turning the screen around to face his side of the desk.

"Why not?" Neal asked, continuing to absently flip through the file, including more photos of the mystery thief.

"The entire security team was doped down during the heist. He poisoned their coffee."

Neal smiled a smile that could resemble pride. He had done that himself in order to get into the sultans palace in Morocco back in the day (although that had been easier, as the Sultan craved just one beverage being served in the palace), and not even Peter had followed him down there to find out how he had gone past the guard post. This thief had style. "Now we know why he set off the alarm on purpose."

"Who said it was on purpose?" Peter asked, leaning over to try to read what Neal had seen in the file.

"The thief drugged down the staff. He set of the alarm to make sure they would be okay. The guards would probably be sent to a hospital after they tried to wake them up and making it visible that the paintings were stolen wasn't necessary, because he hadn't switched it out with forgeries." Neal's smile increased. "This person has morals."

"Morals that let you steal two expensive paintings?" The tone was suspecting, a little bit mocking, Peter did not get it, as usual.

"Morals that let you put yourself at risk to make sure that some extras are okay."

Peter's face turned to something wondering. "You would have done that?"

"Depends on the drug."

Partially satisfied with the vague answer Neal had given him, Peter continued. "What more do you make of this person?"

"Young, inexperienced, but very talented. There isn't much hacking going on, so I wouldn't expect a team to be behind. The job is clean, but filled with small traces of a beginner. He could have used a more secure drug to make sure the guards were okay for example." Neal flipped another page. "And he is a _she_, very likely. Female gymnasts are more frequent than male, and last time I checked, breast implantation is not very common for our gender." Neal handed the file back to Peter, now turned to the page with a picture showing the figure in profile, with small bumps on the chest.

"It could be a man too. Maybe he hid equipment there, or used it to distract us." Peter encountered, while studying the picture close.

"You're willing to put a bet on that?" Neal smiled his most confident smile and angled his head a little bit to the right.

"Who's betting?" Diana stuck her head into the office, and smiled too. Peter rolled his eyes, and pushed the file over the desk again. Diana came inside, and picked it up.

"Neal thinks this is a female thief, I don't."

Diana studied the chest too, before looking up. "Oh, no, that is defiantly a woman. Don't bet against Caffrey, boss."

"Wasn't planning to." Peter encountered, and Neal had to agree that it was a bad idea for Peter's wallet. Out of the about twenty times they had bet against each other, Peter had won exactly once, that time they betted on Elizabeth's tardiness. "What've you got?"

Diana put the file back on the table, and handed Peter another file. "Forensics came in. Our thief is definitely throughout. She poisoned the water cooler, the coffee cart inside the museum, the guards brought-in mugs, coffee in the security room and the coffee they brought in from the shop across the street."

Peter took the file and looked over the details of what Diana already had said. "How did he manage the coffee from across the street? He would have to play barista to pull that off."

"She," Neal implanted quickly. "And I highly doubt it. There are cameras in the shop too, it's too much exposure."

"He," Peter opposed. "Diana, do we have traffic cams from outside the museum?"

"They came in five minutes ago."

"Great. Neal and I will look over it, while you look into the tapes to see when the thief managed to slip poison in the private cups." Peter said, and nodded for Diana to go. She left the office, and Neal went behind Peter's desk, and looked over his shoulder. Peter found the files, and together they looked through the tapes, to see if they could find out where she ("he," Peter protested) had snuck in the sedative.

They had to account for every single minute of that day, so it took them a long time to finally get around to the end of the day, where the guards started to go on coffee runs. The second round, Neal told Peter to freeze the image, something he also did, in the most inconvenient move he possibly could. The guard that they had kept their eyes on was halfway to bumping into a blonde teen as she was crossing the streets. The guard face had frozen into a surprised gasp that looked pretty funny from the security camera, and the stack of cups was about to fall off.

"There," Neal said with a triumphant glance. "That's her."

Peter murmured something (Neal believed it included a comment on the suspects gender), but zoomed in to the scene.

"Look, Peter, she smuggles that thing on the lids!" Neal pointed and Peter played it in half speed. The girl couldn't be much more than eighteen and she was already a professional pick pocket, by the looks of it. While her eyes and right hand was apologizing to the guard, lifting the cups back, one by one, the left made sure that every one of the cups had small doses of a pulverized drug in them before she let the man go, and left, all in an affair on twenty seconds, and all with her face away from the camera.

"Are you sure she isn't an accomplice?" Peter asked, looking closely at the kid, still in slow motion, turning around with a satisfied grin on her face. Neal froze the picture again, and they both got a nice look on her face. Sharp features, blue eyes, dark blonde hair; that was as much they could make out of the blurry camera.

"She looks too satisfied with herself to be." Neal replied, studying the face more closely, while smiling fondly. That girl's smile radiated everything Neal had thought that time he card-tricked himself to 500 bucks richer, or that time he made money of ruining the vending machine, and selling snack in front of it.

"I'll let Diana send the picture through facial recognition, see what comes up." Neal was pulled out of his high school memories by Peter's voice, and understood the small teaming up was finished for now. "Do you mind looking over these?" He handed Neal three other files. "Cases for the next week. But this is defiantly our priority."

"Of course," Neal replied, and pushed the files under his arm. "Just tell me what you get on her, okay?"

He exited the office not really minding the terrible taste the decaf had left in his mouth, because of the case he just had started. This smelled very much like another undercover operation in the near future, and Neal couldn't wait to go back into the field (but Neal did throw the half empty cup away in the closest trash bin when he entered the bullpen).

**New chapter out next Wednesday! :D **


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3 - Jade

Jade was admiring her view. It wasn't the two canvases from two brilliant painters she just had obtained during the night's latest happenings, two paintings that were together worth several hundreds of dollars, nor was it the window that gave her a view over the Hudson River (a little hidden between some houses in the way). It was a view she had brought with as a plus one all the way from Portland, her brother's painting.

The beauty of his Danny Brooks original was breathtaking, especially when Jade knew the story behind. This was the only thing Daniel had left as an explanation after he decided to leave them all for good, a painting expressing with a seeming mess of different shades of mostly red, but also the other primary colors, alone and mixed together, all in a perfect balance of confuse, sadness, hurt, anger, and finally in the end, acceptance.

Before Jade had taken art classes, she didn't understand what the lines meant, what Danny tried to tell Ellen, Ma and herself by leaving this behind, she just figured it had to mean something (which was why she took art classes in the first place, and later studied the art in her spare time, after figuring out that she was quite good at this). Now that she had been introduced, she could understand what he meant, how he felt after finding out that his father was a criminal, not a hero, like he thought.

This was her brother's words, and neither Ellen nor her mother had understood this when he left it behind. But Jade understood every word of the speech he had prepared for them when he left, she understood what he was saying, even now, standing on her bed to get a closer look at the lines and canvas, to suck in every single part of the piece, she saw what the colors and lines and figures meant.

Jade tore her eyes away from the painting, and stepped off her bed. Her fence would arrive in a about an hour, and she had to act professional if she wanted a chance on selling this piece. Her fence was a great guy, the only one that had managed to see through the fact that she was fifteen, and should probably worry about her next geography test, instead of three famous paintings waiting on her kitchen table.

But Marcus, her fence, hadn't been one hundred percent sure that she _could_ do it, even though she had performed before. The diamond heist had been the first, the one that set the standards, and Jade had lived up to her expectations after that one. Her next had been a famous statue she had to carry all the way from the museum she had stolen it from, then an Egyptian artifact, and finally, this. The biggest score so far.

Not that she needed the money, with the latest pricey scores she had collected, she could hold up for a couple of years without setting her foot outside of the warehouse, without getting any kind of job. She had told herself it had been a one-time thing, that time she stood on top of the skyscraper with her rig and a height that was almost estimated in miles not feet. Five seconds later, when she had thrown herself over the edge and screamed out in an exaggerated thrill, she had considered doing this again.

And the next time had gone more or less the same way, until she understood that she _enjoyed_ this. Every part from the planning to the satisfied result in the end was fun, it reminded her about the good old days in Portland, and even if Jade never managed to track Ellen, she could imagine her life going on like this for quite a long time. It felt stable and nice for her already messy life, and knowing her, Jade was not ready to give it up _just yet_, just because of some stupid ideas about right and wrong.

She turned away from the picture, and went back to cleaning the big white room. Some of her rigs were still on the floor, along with half rolled together wires and ropes and the black tight suit she had worn during her robbery in the museum. Beside it were some half-full take-out boxes, a mess of bobby pins and scrunches, some of the clothing she hadn't managed to clean yet, and the freezer she just had managed to start up. Jade had a lot to do between now and the hour until he would arrive.

Coming to think about it, it was probably for the best if she made some safe houses or second homes around the city that was clean or something for occasions such as these. First impressions were important, because they lasted (strictly speaking it wasn't the first time they had met, or the first time he had been inside her place, but she still wanted to clean up a little bit for him), and Marcus was the only accomplice she had, the only way into the criminal underworld, and Jade _needed_ that.

She let her thoughts fly a little while cleaning up her room, and they flew in one determined direction. Daniel Brooks. Something in her head told her that _he_ was the key to finding Ellen; that she needed to find him. But where do you start with finding a person that most certainly did not want to be found by people in his past? What had even made her think that he was connected to Ellen, if he had cut ties with the rest of the family years ago?

Well, Jade thought while missing the trash bin with her Chinese take-out, Danny had been of the forgiving type, even Ellen had said that. And the only thing Ellen had done was telling him the truth, something that Danny probably would appreciate, after some thinking it through. And contacting Ellen again wouldn't probably be that hard, would it? Especially after he changed his own name back to the original.

Jade sighed, and sat down to her wires. All this was filled with a lot of_ ifs_ and _maybes_, but it all _felt _right. Felt like she was going somewhere. The only thing that really stopped the entire train from going forwards was the name. What was Daniel's name now and before he went into wit-sec? Aside from James Bennett, a man disappeared from the earth two years ago, there wasn't any other Bennetts that had a name Jade recognized. And she wasn't all in for visiting Daniel's father just yet.

Two rapid knocks on her door pulled Jade out of her thinking. "'s open!" She shouted, quickly hanging the last rope on one of the hangers she had made for them.

The door opened, and Jade looked over to Marcus standing in the frame, nodding towards her.

"You're early," she commented, pulling her hair back to a messy bun to get the blonde locks out of the way.

"Had an opening." Marcus stepped into the light, and Jade was once again staring her almost-so-tall-he-could've-been-a-basketball-player fence. He was one of those people that looked down on absolutely everyone, and when they did, the piercing eyes made them run and hide. His dark, almost black hair, trench coat and wide-brimmed hat did also help a lot. He looked like the typical gangsters in old movies from the sixties, which was just the magic by it. An inexperienced cop from some small town would have stuffed him in a cell without hesitation and asked questions later, while the average New Yorker would just see _another_ one of that kind. Marcus was a big fan of the hiding in plain sight. "Where is the stash?"

"Over here," Jade pointed to the table that had been cleaned for the occasion, only with three objects still on it. Two paintings, and a magnifying glass. "Where is the cash?"

(Okay, fine, she knew this was a bad rhyme, she just _had to_.)

"I have a buyer lined up for the Matisse. The Rembrandt on the other hand…" Marcus grabbed the magnifying glass and started to authenticate the Matisse.

Jade tried very hard not to sound disappointed. "You can't find a buyer?"

"It's hard, the Rembrandts aren't as popular. But I'm thinking to fence it though a friend of mine, he knows art much better than me." He talked and studied the painting at the same time. "Give me diamonds next time, and you'll get it within a day."

"Well, I don't like diamonds anymore. How long time will it take?" Jade asked, not really worried anymore. Marcus was trustworthy, she could rely on him to get her the money. Now she asked more out of curiosity.

"I'll wire your money for the Matisse tomorrow, but the Rembrandt… A week, care for take." He rose up with the glass in his hand. "Where's is the-"

"Oh, right here." Jade rummaged in a counter and pulled out a small square light. She plugged it in while he turned it on. He continued looking at the paintings for some time, with Jade hovering around, not really sure what to do.

"These looks real," Marcus said after a while, when Jade had moved herself to the armchair she had pushed in here a month ago, and sat playing with a pair of handcuffs she had snatched from a passing cop and a lock pick.

"I told 'ya," Jade replied, yanking the lock upwards and opening the cuffs. "Only the best."

Marcus looked upon her. "You did." He smiled, and that piercing eyes was switched out with something warm and satisfied. He rolled the Matisse together and put it in a tube. "If the money's not in your account by the end of tomorrow, you're allowed to come and kick my ass."

"I'll make sure of it."

"Hide the Rembrandt somewhere safe while I get my contact." Marcus continued, while putting his hat on his head.

"I'll make sure of that too." Jade smiled, and held the door open for him. She escorted him back to the car, already setting up plans where she could put her painting. She knew a hotel…

**Next update next Wednesday. Neal comes closer to the fence, and they figure out a nickname for the thief.**


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4 - Neal

"Okay, fine, _she_ is the prime suspect. You happy?" Peter waved around with the printed out copy of the face, like it was just out of the printer, and Peter needed to air dry it. It was afternoon, and Neal had spent his entire day _not_ working at the Burton Gallery case, while Peter and the others already had given the case a name. A name Neal hadn't gotten out of them yet, because he had been working mortgage frauds and company money laundering, Neal's current arch enemy.

(Neal understood this was the way he was punished for his actions regarding his previous case about two stacks of files in, but it was still dead boring. He wasn't a complainer, mostly because he knew Peter had the keys to his old cell, but those things were made for maintaining the boring-office-job image those agents seemed believe they were a part of. Neal did not include himself in the latter, so why did _he _have to do them?)

"Actually, I am." Neal replied, flipping a paper clip open using his thumbnail. "Do you have a name yet?"

"Andrea Cross." Peter leaned back in his chair. "When is the last time you met an Andrea?"

"Oh, eleventh grade. She was a cheerleader. Borrowed my city bus passes once or twice." Neal mimicked Peter's motion without even thinking about it, causally putting down the paper clip and leaned back in the uncomfortable plastic seat. It helped the counterpart feel connected to him, kept the mark thinking Neal was paying attention. "You?"

"Quantico. Why did you have a city bus pass?"

Neal made a wide smile. "The bus pass was for getting to school before I could get my driver's license. First thing I forged."

Peter mirrored Neal's smile. "Aw, look at that, Neal Caffrey's first forgery and girl."

"We never dated. In exchange for her own pass, I got some test results for a test I had skipped all classes for. Her father was the geometry teacher." Neal picked up the second copy of the picture, taking a closer look at the face he was dealing with. "She was my first deal."

"Well, we're not dealing in geometry tests anymore, these are hundred thousand dollar worth paintings." Peter commented, changing the subject. Neal had the sense Peter wanted to know more about his mysterious past, but dropped it, just to get moving on the case. That implied how much he was enjoying this.

"So how are we going to get it? Andrea isn't the real name." Neal toyed absently with his fedora, while asking.

"How do you know?" Peter let the picture fall to the desk again, and studied it closer.

"It doesn't sound right." Neal answered at first, before picking up the file on Andrea Cross. "Had she added "roads" on the end, I would probably been fooled." He read a little piece of the papers. "Oh, look at that! That driver's license is fake. Soo..." Neal pulled out the O and flipped another page. "…is that student ID _and_ the birth certificate. She's good, though, that's a lot of paperwork for an alias."

Peter leaned over to see what Neal showed him. "Do you think she wanted it to be a permanent alias?"

"Defiantly. She is going through a lot of trouble to blend in. That is the Julliard archives, they're hard to crack." Neal continued reading through the files. "Besides, she doesn't look like a 21 year old drama student. She's probably more around 16-ish."

Peter picked the picture up again and looked closer at the girl. "Sixteen? She's a minor?"

"I would bet on that," Neal replied with another smile, also looking at the picture, while his mind replayed previous happenings. He hadn't been impressed with Scott, the 19 year old kid on his little crime spree in New York, because Neal had done what he did when he was 19, he just felt like it was history repeating itself, and was annoyed with the kid doing what he had done, repeating his mistakes.

This was something else, though. This girl was different. Neal had barely stolen a pack of gum when she already was on million dollar paintings. Her stealing was classy, a kind of lost era, the thief movie classics done again. She knew very well what she was doing, everything was so perfect planned, that Neal really couldn't put this girl under the same roof. He rooted for her, wanted her to get away with the crime, because it was so well thought through.

Regardless of that, Neal knew that he needed to catch her. First of all, because he had a deal with the FBI that required him to take down criminals every now and then (Neal could not kiss his 94% conviction rate goodbye just because of a thief), second because he, as hard it was for him to admit it, shared that little outburst of triumph from Peter when they put another one behind bars. His work with the FBI strictly speaking was an out-of-jail free card, but it didn't mean that he couldn't enjoy his two mile radius and cons approved by federal law.

Mozzie had once called it Stockholm Syndrome, words that had been tingling inside of Neal's mind since Peter offered his help on finding Kate, and Neal had accepted it, resurfacing whenever he didn't need it, sitting with the list of the Nazi Treasure in Peter's bedroom, pushing it away as he sat on the plane to freedom. Both of them knew that solving crime and working for the other side broke every chapter in the book of thieving honor, but none of them had known it would feel so _good_ to be the good guy, and get paid for it at the same time (it wasn't that big of a payment, but that was details that didn't count).

But this girl was like another Neal, the one Neal maybe had been if he hadn't met Mozzie and gone on the Adler con, met Kate, and so on. She was free, fresh, new. And she was good. With that little strings attached that this girl had, she could move very far up in the ranks, further than he might imagine herself.

"Peter," Agent Clinton Jones, who used his last name more than his first for a reason, opened the shut glass door that lead to Peter's office, waking Neal out of his thoughts. He stepped inside without even waiting for an approval, shutting the door behind him. Jones didn't even bother to sit down, he placed himself awkwardly behind Neal and started talking.

"Guess what painting just popped up on the black market." Even though both Neal and Peter easily could guess what painting that went out for sale through less legal services, Jones handed the senior agent the file. Peter opened it up, and smiled that smile Neal knew either meant "This person's getting behind bars" or "The Yankees won against the Red Sox". Neal went for the first. Even though he might not care that much where the tax payers' money put into this division went (except from his rainy-day-account, which he was very protective about), he certainly did not hope that it was wasted on noting down the results of a game.

"The Matisse. Sold and accounted for." Peter replied, clearing all doubt Neal had on the bureau's distribution of recourses. "Do we have the fence?"

Jones conjured another file from nowhere. "We do. Marcus Lease, greasy guy. He fenced a couple of diamonds some months back, but has been laying low since then. He's small time, keeps his head down, and his scores small. Do you think our Virginia Baker has him in the contact list?"

Neal mirrored Peter's triumphant smile, but this time for a whole other reason. "Entrapment? A classic, but still original. Who came up with the nickname?"

"Agent Grant meant Virginia was fitting. A Rembrandt, ways of avoiding the lasers, some real acrobatic skills…" Peter trailed off on his absentminded speech and went back to reading the file Jones had provided for him.

"Although it does miss one fatal thing…" Neal implied, watching over the first file, that Peter just had abandoned for the second.

Peter cut him off. "Don't say it."

"I was going to say mentor, but we can probably look over the security video to see if _that_ particular element…"

"Neal." Peter threw him a glance that shortly and easily told him to shut up.

Jones restrained a smile, and Neal forfeited from his discussion. There was a small pause, as Peter read through the file, Neal read through the other file, and Jones stood behind Neal, waiting for a response.

"Do we have eyes on him?" Peter interrupted the silence.

"No, but a CI knows him, we can pull him in for the Matisse." Jones replied, shifting a little from one foot to the other.

"That doesn't secure the recovery of the Rembrandt, or the catching of the thief. It's the thief I want."

Neal almost sighed at this. Of course Peter would not stop at the fence. "You haven't gotten the Rembrandt?"

"No, it was obviously harder to fence." It was Jones who replied now.

"So, we have Virginia Baker stuck here in New York until she gets rid of the painting." Neal was thinking out loud. "It's too dangerous for her to smuggle them out of the city when the feds are on her. She's going to be smart about it, and sit on it, or make someone else take the risk of exposure."

The usual half-a-second it took for Peter to process Neal's long speech was used to make an innocent smile to his handler, the same expression Neal made after giving up his "trading secrets".

Peter shifted in his chair. "So until he sells the piece, she's stuck. That gives us a little time to find her."

Neal started to tilt his chair backwards. "I have an idea."

He got the imminent attention of Peter and Jones, suspected glances thrown his way. After a second of silence, again, Peter spoke. "Let me guess, it involves you going under as something?"

That innocent smile Neal gave them now approved the suspicion. "Look, she can't get the Rembrandt sold, what if she needs a fence?"

Peter opened his mouth to say something, but at that same moment, Diana walked right into Peter's office without even announcing her arrival. She quickly handed him the file, and he opened it. Again, to Neal's annoyance, there was a small, unnecessary silence while the boss gained information. Neal's head remarked that the core of Peter's Harvard team had unplanned gathered in one room, and also three out of the very short list of people Neal trusted together with himself.

"Well, she's short on fences, that's right," Peter murmured. "Marcus is dead."

Diana supplied. "Organized Crime sent it over. The hitter was part of the mob, and so was the order."

Neal woke up on the mention of the big chump of the New York underworld. "What did the mob want with him?"

Diana raised her eyebrows and her shoulders made a short shrug. "Don't know yet. It's the case of Organized Crime, and you know they're protective about their cases. I just got the heads up because the guy is tied up with our case."

"So I'm on?" Neal tried, thinking it was either a memory potion or a miracle that could help him convince Peter to let him go undercover after last time. The previous fence dying was as close to a miracle he could get.

Peter moved his lips as to say something, then he shut them tightly, reminding Neal of a lost guppy. Neal could basically see the cogwheels going around inside his head, putting the pros and cons against each other. He looked up at Diana and Jones for support, who both shrugged, as to say "Don't look at me, I am just as unsure about this as you are" and "I'm so glad I'm not the one calling the shots here".

"No leaps off the plan?"

Neal didn't really understand why his partner tried to make him promise something like that, he wasn't the one that had thrown the bag of cash in the black van and ordered himself to get in and drive to Queens, nor was it him that had pointed that gun at Peter (although he might have triggered the events, but that didn't count). "No leaps off the plan." Neal promised.

Peter wasn't done. "No running off with the suspect and the damning evidence?"

"That was a one-time thing," Neal protested, but continued when Peter stared at him with his piercing grey eyes. "No running off with the suspect and the damning evidence against her."

He knew that Jones and Diana in this moment was sharing small smiles behind his back, enjoying the lecture. "I promise!" He continued, doing a lot of necessary movements to prove he meant it, slightly holding out his palms, angling his head to the right, keeping the eye contact.

(For the record, he really did mean it, Neal was just more aware of what he did, and with Peter's suspicion it was better to be at the safe side.)

"Fine." Peter seemed unsure about his own decision when he said it. "You'll go under as a fence. And just so we're clear, this is not a reward for handling the previous case well, I just want this kid off the streets. The second you get too deep, I'll be pulling you out, blowing the cover or not."

Neal held back the childish urge to punch out in the air and shout something along the lines of "Oh, yeah, baby!" and restrained it to a triumphant smile. He ignored the veiled threat Peter had made for him in his triumph to get put back into the field, Neal Caffrey's one and only drug. Neal could hear Jones and Diana shifted uncomfortably behind him, probably feeling bad for their boss' headache. They both left after some mumbled "good luck"s and walked out to their desks. Neal knew they were half sarcastic and half concerned.

"So, do you have any ideas?" Neal asked when the other agents had left.

"I thought you always had one," Peter replied shortly, finally putting down a file.

Neal had picked up the Andrea file a long time ago, and did not put it back down just to talk to Peter. "I do. But I thought I should hear yours first, since we're doing the whole no-leaps-off-the-plan-thing."

Peter used a second to get annoyed at Neal, before answering him. "Well, my plan is to hear what you are thinking."

"I think Andrea is the way in," Neal smiled. "She climbs every Thursday after hours at Chelsea Piers. It's a private meeting ground, and I can pose as a buyer." His smile was now persuasive, egging Peter along on his track.

"How do you know she comes in after hours?" Peter asked, curios.

Neal started tilting his chair backwards again. "She checks in, but she doesn't check out." He leant forward to show Peter the documents, and the chair hit the floor with a small bang. "She wants to be alone when she climbs."

Peter was again showing off signs of disbelief and distrust. "And you're just going to go inside, tell her that you are the buyer of the Rembrandt, and… get the piece?" He asked, shaking his head. "Because if we don't have any hard evidence against her, there is no reason to put her in. We need to recover the Rembrandt to secure the case."

Neal barely resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He wished he had Sara there, so he could win money on Peter giving him the "more evidence speech" again. "Got it."

"You sure? Because the last time you said you got it, you almost blew my head off." Peters suspicion wasn't entirely off yet (in fact, it had switched on the moment Neal arrived, and just grown rapidly during the entire visit).

"I said I got it," Neal protested, rising up from his chair, still with what his ex-girlfriend called his million dollars smile plastered on his face. He left without another word, knowing that Peter was on the hook. Besides, Peter didn't have any better idea.

**Just gotta tell you how amazed I am with the response I get for the story. It might not be much, from a wider perspective, but the fact that so many people read it, let along follow the story is amazing. Thank you so much! And thanks to my reviewer chicca01, you're amaze too :DD Y'all make my day 3 Next update next Wednesday.**

**-CoolCoke**


	5. Chapter 5

**A little short chapter today, and I'm a little late. Not really happy about this either, but still… Thanks to my reviewers, chicca01 (again) and elizabethhadely13, cuz they're awesome. Hope this'll suffice.**

Chapter 5 – Jade

Dead.

Marcus. Dead.

Marcus was dead.

Jade had been trying to push the feeling that something was wrong all day, her gut begging her to get out of her little warehouse, to visit him before, and when she finally obeyed the gut, she had met her life's worst nightmare. Shouting police officers. Yellow Dutch tape. Three black, _obviously_ FBI employee owned cars.

She had first believed it to be an arrest, that even though he was so careful, Marcus had been caught fencing the Matisse or _something_. She had not believed this, not imagined it even. But when the stretcher with the white clothing rolled out of the house, and a Forensics specialist held up one of his characteristic coats, drenched in blood through the window, she couldn't deny the truth anymore. Tears flooding her eyes, Jade had run home.

It was brainless, she knew that, mostly because she knew that now that he was dead, she was automatically in the danger zone, but Jade didn't really fell like going through the sewers like a ninja turtle for a good safe house right then and there, so she took her chances. And even now, half an hour later, she didn't feel like leaving at all, everything she wanted was to break something.

In which case she did. Her mirror went first into pieces, then the fake Chinese vase she had stolen to get her place to seem more homey, then three out of four glasses she used to drink from, and after that, four out of ten plates. She ended up standing in the middle of the mess in her apartment, sobbing loudly towards the white-painted ceiling, wondering how on _earth_ the world could be so unfair towards her.

The fifteen minutes it took for her to get rid of the tears for her only real friend in this city was the same fifteen minutes it took for her to realize how ridiculous she looked right there. She pulled herself together with a sharp soothing _it's over, there is nothing to gain from crying over it_, and moved over to her bed. This place could be burned, she would have to move over to a safe house Marcus didn't know about just in case…

No. He wouldn't rat her out. Just in case he had something in his house that could link her to the warehouse, that was it. Jade stumbled over to her bed, and started taking off the sheets. She rolled Danny's painting together and placed a rubber band over it, got the remains of her stuff out of the apartment. She also cleaned out everything else, made the warehouse look like it never had been inhabited, moved her harnesses and ropes in one bunch, the clothes and papers another. She hadn't stopped the occasional sobs during the hours it took her to get done. In fact, the physical challenge it provided let her evaluate everything, go through it all the best she could muster. She also picked out another safe house to get to, just because the ninja turtle didn't suffice, and wasn't worth it.

In the end, she sat back in her old home, a white-painted room with an empty bed-frame, some cardboard boxes by the door Jade was going to take out when she left, and a skewed wooden table she just yesterday had Marcus standing by, examining the paintings. In the middle of the white floor, she sat herself, with Danny Brooks painting in her hands.

Yes, she knew that she had removed it as like the second thing, but if felt symbolic _right_ to let that thing be the last one out of the old home. It was the last thing she had removed from her house in Portland too.

The red lines fascinated her, even though it had been a long time she had been this close to it. She could see one of them end up in an explosion of colors further down, colliding with another, different shaded red line.

But what was that? In one of the small yellow sparks of firework from the explosion further up, there was a tiny little flaw in the canvas. A black spot. Something so tiny, she hadn't ever seen it before. Jade tried to brush the flaw away from the canvas, thinking it was only a tiny baby fly or something like that, but when she was unsuccessful, Jade pulled the painting closer to her eyes, so she could see what it was.

Two seconds out of intense staring, she got up and started going through the boxes that was left.

She pulled out a magnifying glass, swallowed the lump in her throat when she realized it was the same optic that Marcus had been using the day before, and went back to the painting. The small spot was relocated, and she put the glass towards it. A smile crept upon her face, as she made out the black dot.

It was initials. And the initials wasn't Danny Brooks', DB, they were someone else's. An N and a C. She didn't understand what they meant, or how they got there, but she understood something else. This was _who_ Daniel was now. NC. Nelson Collins or Nick Cader or Nolan Clementi or something like that, was her brother. She had, unintentionally, come closer to finding Danny. It was a small Band-Aid for a huge wound named Marcus, but Jade gained strength from it.

Her brother was named NC now, and Jade Brooks had just come closer to finding him. She might only have initials, but it was enough. She smiled and got off the floor. Time to meet her new apartment, and figure out what these initials stood for.


	6. Chapter 6

**New chapter, yay! I'm excited for this one, finally something happening or something :DD**

Chapter 6 - Neal

Chelsea Piers looked all still and nice in the middle of the night. Manhattan still had its cabs and limos running to and from events, but they all seemed to tune themselves down a notch, respecting the fact that it was past midnight, and small kids wanted to sleep. There were few houses that still had the lights on, but Neal believed the windows and lamp posts that were not affected by the black blanket New York had wrapped itself in, simply did it to respect the legend named The City That Never Sleeps. It would have been perfectly quiet, hadn't it been for the three agents parked across the street forcing him to wear an earplug, and repeatedly shouted in his ear.

Neal hadn't had the heart to tell them to shut up so he could hear himself think (let alone enjoy the silence New York provided), simply in solidarity towards two out of three in that van. Peter had brought his infamous devilled ham sandwich, and if it wasn't enough with the smothering feeling of closed in space the van already there, Peter had to bring another smelly object towards the mix.

Diana was confirming eyes and ears on Neal, Jones wanted to know it his in-watch transmitter worked, and Peter was telling him to go right after plan. It was like taking and answering calls from three people at the same time, but luckily, Neal had made situations like these his job, so he simply raised his wrist towards his mouth and said "I'm going in".

That shut two out of three in the van up, the same two out of three Neal felt sorry for. Peter was too busy giving him the "by the book, no leaps off the plan" speech to be stopped by a simple comment. Nevertheless, and true to his word, Neal waltzed inside of the sports club right in from of him, trying not to make a face on Peter's ongoing speech.

It took him some rooms to get to the rock climbing wall, and that was about the time it took for Peter to finish his speech. The double doors opened to the huge, three stories big hall, and Neal blinked a little, used to the darkness that had haunted the place since he got inside. He looked around after he had removed the bright spots on his vision. Neal scanned the floor first, and saw a water bottle, some climbing equipment and a thick yellow rope laying there. Out from the mess, two pieces of rope rose high in the air in parallel lines, all the way up to the floor, Neal made the assumption that there was someone up there. He stepped closer to them, and looked up.

The first thing he saw was the blond messy bun, and after that, the black back, the harness that was attached to the rope, the left foot stretched out ninety degrees out to the left, the right foot tiptoeing on a fake stone, one hand holding the body up, the other securing the rope in a bolt in the wall using a quickdraw.

Neal whistled to get the girls attention, and she jumped so violently that she lost the balance, and fell down from her secure position, hanging in the bolt she just had attached the rope to. It was far away, so Neal couldn't really see anything of her face, other than a short flash of fear.

And then the flash was over, and Neal suddenly saw the end of a gun pointing towards him. Fortunately, he was a better con that she was, and managed to hide the flash he had of fear even before it begun, and just looked up at her and the gun with an expression of indifference and peace. "Hey," he said, seemingly not bothered at all by the gun pointed at him.

"Did they send you?" The girl asked, her voice trembling even so little.

"Define 'they'," Neal replied, stepping closer to the equipment below her feet and tilting his head even more, so he could look up at her. "I talked to Marcus," he lied easily.

"Are you carrying?" She changed her face to suspicion and disbelief, but Neal also saw that one of the hands holding the gun went from its task to get a better grip at the wall.

Neal opened his very nice looking Devoir, so she could see the lack of firearm in there. He smiled reassuring to the face that quite reminded him of Peters face these past days. She slowly lowered the weapon, and stuck it in a holster she had connected to her harness.

While getting back into the position Neal had seen her in before, she started talking. "Let me just finish up here first. I have one bolt left, It's easier to get the stuff down like that." She dried the sweaty forehead with the backside of her hand, before climbing up again.

"Take your time," Neal answered. He pulled the watch up to his mouth by pretending to scratch his nose and said lowly "She's definitely not twenty-one, Peter."

The only thing he got back from that was Peter barking "Stay focused," in his ear and no "good to confirm the suspect, Neal" or "You stayed calm during that gun, Neal, are you okay?" Nothing new on that front in other words.

Andrea took her time, and a little more while she was on it. Climbing ten feet up to the next bolt with a carbine hook in the end was a time requiring matter, but when she finally got up and started repelling down again to the ground, she also had to stop at every ten feet to loosen the rope from the bolts that were screwed into the wall. Neal watched, reminding himself about the time that had passed since he had a try in an indoor rock climbing center.

When he finally touched the ground with a low _thump_, Neal could see why she hadn't been shy with the gun. The face was defiantly a teenager's, and he knew just as much as she did that age just made you look weak. The gun was a way for her to set another first impression on the other person.

She started stripping off the equipment. "So what do you want?"

Neal tried to keep his face even from feeling sorry for a long lost childhood swimming around in there, and set on a confident smile, combining it with a shrug. "I want the Rembrandt."

She stopped pulling in the rope that went through the top bolt. "You're Caleb, the fence." She squinted suspiciously.

Peter's voice sounded in Neal's ear. "She's testing you, Neal, be careful." It was a comment Neal could've managed without, he knew she was, but he appreciated it. Peter had his back. "I don't know about Caleb, but Marcus contacted me three days ago and told me you had a Rembrandt. I'm Henry." He held out his hand (thinking he really would regret it, hers were filled with sweat and chalk).

Her one-sided-smile was surprisingly alike Neal's when she dried the hand off a towel and shook his. "Andrea Cross." She said, and went back to getting out of her harness. (Neal remarked that she used the same name she had on the card Chelsea Piers had sold her. Clever.) "How much do you offer?" She asked and leaned down to the rope.

"Ten percent of the cut." Neal knew it was little money for her, but most fences would start up with a small cut and negotiate on the price.

She smiled again, arranging the rope. "Ha. I want fifty thousand, traded for the painting. And I also need your help getting it." She sat down, and undid her shoelaces, seemingly unmoved by the high prizes discussed.

"I thought you already had it," Neal replied, making his tone a little worried, but smiling inside. This was going to end up a longer project than planned.

"I do, I just hid it in plain view, which makes it harder to get." The second shoe went off, and they were thrown into the bag. "I originally planned Marcus to get it there, but I don't trust you, so I'll come with."

The other pair of shoes was put on, and she put all the other stuff inside the bag, while Neal debated whether he should tell her she was smart to not trust him or not. "Fifty thousand is a lot of money, kid."

She snorted once. "Oh please. If you can't get two hundred grand or more for that thing you're not that good fence Marcus thought you were."

Neal smiled, a little intrigued by this comment. "Your cut will be 25 %. That's a lot for the fence trying to con the kid out of her money."

This made her smile again. "Look," she said, pulling out a note from her bag. "I have the painting here somewhere. Show up there, and dress nicely."

Neal looked at the address, but didn't recognize it. It was someplace downtown, but other than that, nothing. And when he looked up, she had vanished.

Making the same one-sided smile she had left him with, Neal walked out of the building, after turning out the light in the big room, thinking to himself that Peter wasn't going to talk him out of another opportunity of going undercover.

***Sighs*This was short also. Everything is getting shorter… **** haha Word made me a sad face and an arrow. Now I'm happy again.**

'**Till next week!**


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7 - Jade

There was nice clothing she had demanded, and nice clothing Henry showed up in. Jade had to say she was impressed, for a guy that wore a Devoir to a meeting in a gym. He wore a three piece suit, with the vest and everything, a slick tie with a matching napkin, and a _hat_ for crying out loud! A fedora, with the brim flipped over his eyes. She was torn between impressed clapping and slapping her palm to her forehead in resignation.

Instead she walked forward, with her white Dior dress and black pumps (that was harder to get into than she thought) and a nice little flat purse she carried under her arm. Her hair was put up in a bun that went over her entire back head, and she even had painted her face over to sell the whole 21-year-old thing. Basically, it was a huge improvement from the sweaty girl at the gym, looking at the normal people perspective.

"Hey," Jade said softly, living the oh-so-rich-girl fantasy.

Henry nodded towards her, seemingly busy toying with his watch.

Jade pretended like she didn't notice his childish outburst, but that wasn't necessary, because he stopped at once she started. He looked up and blinked innocently with his big blue eyes. Jade was impressed, this person definitely knew how to get around with good looks and charm. She returned the gesture by blinking herself, letting the heavy eyelashes do the work for her.

Henry broke the stand-off with a smile that would have dazzled her, hadn't Jade been too busy with returning it with her own. The entire thing took just half a second, but they learned so much about each other during this time, more than minutes of conversations ever would.

"Where's the Rembrandt?" Henry asked, stopping the smiling competition.

"Not here," Jade replied, gesturing for him to follow her down the street. He did, but his smile changed to the classic con to some kind of pride. Jade took it as a compliment. Of course she wasn't going to give him the address where the painting were, she gave him an address close by, so she could walk him there and make sure he didn't steal it and got away with the cut. She wasn't stupid.

While they walked, Henry started small talk. Jade figured it was to keep the inevitable awkward silence at bay. "So you hide all your paintings in a con-worthy place?"

Jade smiled, and let her hand examine her hair to make sure nothing was out of order. "It wasn't originally meant for me to come back for. Marcus was supposed to fetch it by himself, but I don't trust you, so..."

Henry didn't seem mad at this comment, he simply nodded understandingly, and said "Trust is a hard thing to come by." It seemed like he was used to the paranoia beforehand. "So where are we going anyways?" he asked right after.

Jade pointed across the street to a fancy hotel, and smiled. She felt really clever by doing this. In the hotels dining hall, there was a replica of the same Rembrandt she just had stolen, and Jade, a huge fan of the hiding in plain sight, had simply switched out the replica with the real thing. It was very easy for her to walk back in and just steal the original. The fake was behind it in the frame, so no one was going to see it missing or anything. This was what she told Henry, and he seemed enjoyed by her unveiled self-esteem. It took them over the street and even a little further before Jade was done explaining.

When they finally arrived outside of the hotel, Jade stopped. "Remember," she said, fixing her hair again. "Your name is Harold, you're Scandinavian, you are my father and you own a huge oil company."

Henry was on board from the start. "Accent?"

"They are all fine with British." Jade replied, moving the purse from under her arm to her hand. "None of them have been further east than the UK anyways."

This was something Henry found amusing, but he played easily along when Jade grabbed his elbow and led him into the building.

"You can confiscate my beach house, my cell phone, but if you touch my Lexus-" She started, hoping this guy was that good of a con that she thought.

There was nothing to worry about. "That Lexus drove a hundred in the Hamptons last week, you'd be crazy to think that I need another speeding ticket!" His accent was superb, sounded newly imported from London.

Jade sighed loudly and rolled her eyes. "That was the first this year, you didn't take Christians when he crashed into those trash bins last year!"

"Christian wasn't drunk, you were!"

"Rubbish! I had a few by the bar, but I was perfectly sober when they pulled me in!"

Both of them shut up at the same time, and Jade turned to the receptionist. "Butcher. Jenny Butcher and this is Dad, Harold Butcher."

"Mr. Butcher, finally." The receptionist made a strict smile. "Mind you, I have only seen your daughter in here, I was starting to think you didn't exist."

Henry smiled too. "I've been too busy to attend Sunday brunches for some time now. Had a business travel through Europe."

When they got passed through, and let the small discussion fall down, Henry whispered "Butcher?" in Jade's ear.

"I was under pressure. Just stolen a statue right next to a butchers shop, and it was the first thing I could think of," Jade replied apologetically, to whom, she wasn't sure. "You've got coopers and carpenters, why not a butcher?"

Henry just smiled, and walked further inside the building. "So where is the painting?"

"Dining hall. It's full right now, so we're going to have to wait for it to empty."

"How long will that take?" Henry was curious, and stopped beside Jade. They were standing next to the wall, and Jade was smiling widely, like she was told a secret.

"About five minutes," she smiled, and pulled the fire alarm.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8 - Neal

That clever little kid. Neal had to say, he wasn't really impressed by her seemingly random act when she pulled the fire alarm, but looking at it from a different perspective, it was defiantly something that he would've done, had he been in a similar situation. As the staff ushered the slightly hysterical crowd of rich people out of the building, both Neal and Andrea hid in stalls in the bathroom.

It was a classic move, but it was the easiest. Exactly five minutes after the alarm had gone off, they both stepped into the empty hall. Neal smiled approvingly and followed the kid's fast pace in one direction.

"So." She made her way through three doors and a kitchen before stopping at a door. "It's empty, and we'll just walk through and grab the painting."

"So what did you need me for?" Neal asked, trying to make a visual of the room they were just about to enter through the small square windows in the door.

"The receptionist told me off last time because I wasn't old enough. I needed a chaperone to get in." She turned around from picking the lock on the door. "Besides, I like company."

Neal heard the lock go up with a loud _click_ and Andrea rose up. She smiled, turned towards the windowed door, and put her hand on the handle. Then the girl stiffened. Her shoulders tensed, her hand clutched around the round handle, her breath started to go fast.

"What?" Neal said out loud, leaning over to see though the window to see what it was. Two men in uniforms was standing in the room, looking around and clearly guarding something. But Neal wasn't that blind. There was a gang tattoo hidden under the white tee, shoes that looked comfortable running in, instead of the standards the receptionists had, and when one of them turned around, there was a small lump right over his belt on his back. It did not take a genius to figure out what that was.

"A gun," Neal whispered, and heard Peter's loud moan in his ear. It wasn't much Neal could do to simplify the difficulty this operation had reached. Guns usually predicted bad things, and Neal, who had sworn that he'd make this sting as simple as possible saw, for the first time, a way for him to not be able to keep his promises.

(Not that the term _keeping promises_ was very common to Neal, usually he slit away from a lot of the commitments he made by making the other person _think_ he'd done it. It was more withholding the truth than lie, really.)

They both stood there and watched the two men vigilantly scouting the room. The first one guarded the entrance that led out to a hall, the most likely place someone would show up if they wanted to fetch a painting, and the second stood beside the painting in question. Neal was just about to suggest a Wally Burns, when one of them shouted out and started pointing at their very obvious hiding spot.

They both backed away from the door, and lined up on the wall beside door. None of them dared to look out the window, but then again, they didn't need to. One of the people, the most tattooed-up one opened the door and stared them both down. Neal felt something cold creep up inside him and recognized it at once. It was adrenaline.

Before he could do anything, Andrea had taken charge of the situation. She grabbed a huge silver plate from a cart and slammed it in the head of the guy. "Run," she said in a low voice, while she let go of the silver plate and looked over to Neal with a white face and wide open green eyes. "Run!"

Neal didn't wait a second to obey this order. He sprinted after the girl with the gang members following in their heels. A second later, he heard gunshots, and Neal bowed down, making himself a smaller target. They sprinted around the corner, down some stairs to the right, left… Neal lost track. He just followed the black high heels up and down staircases, around corners, and when she got a second to catch her breath and threw the heels out the window, her bare feet. The shooters were right behind, sending bullets after them whenever all four as in a narrow corridor.

Fortunately for Neal, none of them were very good shots, but that didn't stop Neal's heart from almost beating out of his chest and his pulse to go amok in his throat. Through the adrenaline and the panting, Neal tried to say some words for every bullet that slammed into the wall in front of him, for the people in the van's sake.

The kid made an unexpected turn, and slammed right into a solid metal door. Neal panted and stopped dead behind her, his eyes frantically searching for a way out of the dead end. His eyes darted from the cold metal to the two men running after them, closing in rapidly. The girl didn't seem bothered at all, she simply made one step away from the door, and kicked it, hard.

To Neal's obvious surprise, it moved, and the kid pushed the door wide open. They ran through, followed again with the two mobsters, who were closing in. At one point, Neal managed to slam his left wrist into the wall, while trying to make it around a corner. He heard the sound of his watch crunching, and Peters shouting in his ear approved his suspicion. They couldn't hear him in the van anymore.

When the furniture and architecture changed inside the house, Neal realized what the metal door had done. They had changed from the hotel to the house right beside. Neal was on the edge to smiling, but then the people behind managed to get two more bullets after them (Neal was surprised they even had bullets left), and the smile quickly vanished.

When Neal was starting to grow tired of running, the adrenaline starting to end, his breath had problem getting oxygen to his muscles, Peter had stopped shouting his name in his ear, and was instead calling for backup, and every step taken by the bare feet in front of him was a little heavier, like they were more happy to fall down than they were for being lifted up.

Then, she halted again. Just like last time it was a metal door, and just like last time, Neal managed to crash unsophisticated into said door. Andrea didn't really mind, she was too busy getting something out of her wallet. It was a keycard. She opened the door using it, and pulled him inside too.

The door shut with a low _thump_. Neal let out a huge breath, as the silence enclosed around him (except from Peter, who had gone back to talking to Neal, nagging him with threats such as "Prison" and "desk duty for a month" and so on). "This way," Andrea exhaled and pointed towards another door, ten meters forwards, and Neal followed. They heard gunshots from the other door, but that was all they heard, the thick metal blocked everything else.

She held the keycard to another door, and Neal had to ask. "Where did-"

"Questions later," she cut him off while opening the door. "Safety first."

This door did not, as Neal expected, open to another corridor. There was a quiet room with something that at first could look like black fridges, but when looked at from the front were rows upon rows with hard drives.

Neal had, allegedly, visited one or two of these in his past on um… grey area business, and knew that the silence and green light that the room usually had in movies and so on was just a big bluff. The rooms containing hard drives were loud and ice cold, because of the amount of fans that had been installed under the floor to keep the drives in right temperature for the optimal speed. Every row with fridges had glass doors to make sure the temperature was the right one, and even then the computers radiated heat. And the green light in the ceiling, casting eerie, science fiction-ish shadows as whatever thief who went inside and stuffed an USB pen into a port at random, while it spewed out viruses to the conveniently placed computer screen, was simply a white beam from the ceiling light.

That was, if the room was working. This was as silent as the ones in the movies, with a comfortable room temperature. (Neal was thankful, there was no cliché green light or screens anywhere, nor did he see a valid place to put an USB in.)

"The place was shut down after a failure in one of the fans. None of them realized the mistake before it was too late, the entire thing shut down automatically, and all the disks were lost." Andrea rambled while picking up a red object with two suction cups on each side and levers above them to fasten the device. She sat it right down on the tiled floor, and pulled up one of the tiles.

Neal smiled when he saw the room under there. It was three to four feet high, had some wires in the left corner, and unmistakably had the room for a con artist and a thief. Neal jumped down without hesitance (there was voices drawing nearer, they must've gotten a keycard some other way) and waited for the kid to get the suctions off the tile to jump through the hole too. The tile was heavy, and she needed his help to get it to cover the opening.

Right at the same time as the tile got it in place, the door busted open.

The sound around them had shut at once they went underground. Neal was trying to cope with replacing his eleventh favorite hiding place (even Mozzie would be proud of this one), and catch his breath at the same time, while the only thing they heard from outside of their little hiding place was footsteps over them.

Neal had lit his phone to give them light, and Andrea had done the same. They sat silence, just listening to the eerie silence from right above. When Peter, once again, started shouting in his ear, Neal picked up his phone and texted him an update.

"Who's Peter?" The kid leaned over to Neal's side, and he had to restrain himself from automatically hiding his phone from her sight. His text was a _still alive and with the suspect_ one, and if the kid saw it, their covers would be blown before they could say "arrest".

"A friend," Neal just replied, vaguely on purpose. "I was supposed to meet with him after picking up the painting."

She smiled to show she had gotten the answer, and pulled her knees up to her jaw, rested her face on it. It was something vulnerable about the position that made Neal wanting to come over and hug her. She was good!

"What about the key card?" Neal was curious enough to start another conversation.

"Oh, I got it from a guy in here a couple of weeks ago. The place is shut down, so I didn't think he would care."

"Ah..." Neal replied, and shut up to reflect on that. If she had gone through the trouble to get that card, it must mean she had been through escape routes.

None of them said anything after that, just pressed a button whenever one of their phones went out. There were still steps above them, and they both knew that they were going to be here a long time. It was a kind of mutual respective silence that ruled.

Five minutes went by. Ten minutes went by. Then fifteen, then twenty. The room was starting to test Neal's patience, and he started to count the seconds between lighting the screen on his iPhone and when it turned off.

"Was Peter the buyer?" Neal almost jumped when her voice sounded from the corner she had crawled into.

"Hmm?"

"The one you texted… Peter. Was he going to buy the Rembrandt?"

Neal pressed the button once again, and looked over to the girl looking up at him from the light of her phone. "No… He's a fence. It wasn't important; we were just going to discuss prizes." He improvised.

She leaned her head at the wall behind her, looking up. "He doesn't sound like a fence. Peter… It sounds more like a fed."

"I'll make sure not to tell him that." Neal replied, smiling a little. Now he was really sorry he had ruined his watch, this should have been on tape. A flash of Neal using the argument "A teenager can see through it" whenever Peter made a new alias with the same first name made him smile.

The girl smiled through the dark at him like they shared a secret. "Your name isn't Henry, is it?"

"You're not twenty-one are you?" Neal encountered.

Her smile grew. "No."

They went back to silence again, but Neal didn't feel like it. Talking with the suspect was considered less waste of bureau resources than finding out how long time his phone used to turn itself off. "So how old are you? Honestly."

She didn't answer at first, started playing with the clip of her purse and pressed the button on her phone again. When it lit up, she had placed the purse on one of the cables that went on one side. One side of Neal congratulated him for trying in forfeit, while the other whispered _wait for it… Wait for it…_

"Sixteen." She finally admitted, letting her fingers trace out the number on the floor. "I'll be seventeen in a month, so it's kinda sixteen, but not really."

The short ramble was a little cute, Neal though, when he pressed the button on his phone once again. "I guess I should be asking why you're not in school."

She snorted out a laugh before she leaned her head back at the wall, eyeing the tiles above. "You should." _…But you're not._ The last part wasn't said out loud, but Neal wasn't an idiot. He understood context of what she said easily.

He moved on to the next subject on his list. "You're new to the city, huh?"

"Been here a year, aged ten." The reply was rapid, like she didn't want to talk about it, but Neal urged her on with an intense glare. "Portland. I'm from Portland."

"That's a long way from home." Neal commented, smiling.

"It never was home." The kid scowled, before she took the purse from the cables. She opened it, and pulled out a tissue. Then she started to rip it into pieces. Touchy subject, Neal thought.

"What is the story?" He egged her along, smiling gently.

She looked up from the molested tissue. "What is this, twenty questions?" Neal could see that her eyes squinted in suspicion.

"Hey, we're stuck in here for a long time, we might as well make nice while we're at it."

She wasn't all convinced yet. "If you're so big on sharing, you can start."

Neal's light went out, and it gave him time to rearrange his face to the kind grandparents had when they started with the _When I was young…_ thing. "It isn't a good story." He started.

"Neither is mine. We can compare notes."

Neal restrained an enjoyed smile. He threw another glance at the expecting face of the girl, before he started talking. _The best lies hides in the truth_…

**Sorry for the late update, I was in a sleepover :]  
So finally I can put a little more length in these things, I mean I've had a couple of chapters under a thousand words, and I honestly think it's too little to get the story going with. It's basically one scene and then I'm done. This event is going to carry on for 1 ½ chapter more, so I hope we get some more… uh… something in the following chapters. I'll also start to pull out the chapters with more than just one scene, just to make them longer.**

**Let's hope Neal and Jade stop beating around the bush soon and understand why they are similar in so many ways, especially when Neal tells his story to get her to open up ;)**

**I guess we'll see… NEXT TIME!**

**Also thanks to all my followers. Don't think I don't see 'ya, 'cause I do. It's so cool that people would like their inbox to be spammed every Wednesday with updates from my head. Means the world and a little bit more. Thnx.**

**AAAAAALSO, we're about halfway into the story now, and I've started very briefly on a sequel, so GO US!**

**This is the end of the chapter, I promise. :]**


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9 - Jade

Jade was listening closely when he started the story. Mostly because she was bored, but also because she liked stories, especially those which were true and good, and the way he started it off made it all sound like the best story she would ever hear.

"I moved in here when I was twenty. I met a guy who was in the business, and we paired up together. He convinced me to be the front man in a long con we ran on a really rich guy. The thing we didn't know, was that he was running a huge Ponzi scheme on us all. Biggest failed con of all time, except from one single thing. Kate." Henry hadn't turned his light on again, which suited Jade well. She understood that he didn't want her to see his face.

"She was the secretary, and we fell in love. When the entire thing came crashing down on us, I lost everything. She didn't want to talk to me, because I had lied to her, I had cashed inn all the bonds I had forged to get into the inner circle and so on. When she finally forgave me, and we managed to calm down a little bit, get ourselves back on our feet, I got caught. Served four years in Rikers, for bond forgery, off all things. And my girlfriend…" He traced off, and in the tiny bit of light Jade's phone managed to shine over to him, Jade could see his eyes gone forever lost in dreams.

"She died." He finally admitted. "Blew up in a plane. I understood I needed to start over, so I changed my name, and made new strings. Fencing wasn't really my thing, but I needed a pause form everything. It wasn't like there was anyone there when I needed them most."

It took Jade five seconds of thinking about what he said, before she realized that there was silence between them. "But where were they?"

He didn't answer. Her movements went back to pressing the button on her phone whenever it went dark, and she continued to think about the story. It was too… sad to be cooked up, to heartbreaking, and his eyes, like hers were a little more glistening than before.

"Now it's your turn."

"What?" Jade asked, totally lost in her own world.

"I told my story, now it's your turn." The traces of angst and sadness that had been on his face the last minutes was completely disappeared for a smile of curiosity and encouragement, and he had picked up his phone for something.

"I never said I would share back," Jade replied, a little nonchalantly, and returned the smile he gave her. "What are you doing anyways?"

He looked up from the light in his phone, and Jade could see the iPhone massager screen in the reflection in his aqua blue eyes. "I think I know a friend who can get us out of here."

"Didn't you see them? Those were the _mob_!" Jade's voice was reduced to a low hissing. "They have probably called in reinforcements already. So unless you have…" Her thoughts trailed off a little, before Jade managed to pick them up again, "I don't know, a SWAT team or something, we can't come out before they think we've gotten away!"

Was that a smile playing on his face? If it was, Jade thought, it was the worst timing for it. She had quite enough of his lure smirks for now, so she huffed and turned on the lights on her smartphone again.

"That means we are getting stuck here for at least a couple of hours…" He started, which was true, Jade thought, as she pulled the hair that had loosened from her messy bun into the remaining bobby pins. "And since we have nothing else to do…"

She frowned, and let her hands fall back to her lap. "Fine. But I stop whenever I want to, and none of this is going outside of this room."

Henry pulled his fingers to his mouth, pretended to zip it close, and throw the keys away. "My lips are sealed." He promised.

Like Henry, Jade awarded herself with a second to get really distant glassy eyes, lean back against the wall and _remember_. And finally, she began to talk. "I told you I was from Portland, right?" She started, and continued almost before Henry was able to nod. "Well, I lived there since I was eight, and there was a lot of…" She stopped. She didn't want to mention WITSEC or Ellen or the Marshalls. "…mess around the moving... thing. You know, your mom pulling you into a plane one day and worry about the stuff later kind.

"So when I arrived, I had no friends, no family, nothing. I talked to people in school, but I also got to know a bunch of hustlers in town. They taught me some stuff, and were pretty nice, you know, if I helped them bring weed from one place to another." A fond smile, "I could pick pockets and con cops before I was ten."

At this she stopped for a second, letting the memories of Mike, Bobby, Kel, Harry and Ann wash over her. Their stressing around a little grass in a plastic bag, or some grams of sugar confused the eight-year-old Jade, but she had just smiled, and told them not to worry. Hidden the powder in the box of sugar she was bringing home to Ma, and the grass in the bouquet of flowers. It didn't take her long time to understand what it was, but she pretended it was something else for years, because it was easier to lie to the cops like that.

Jade blinked once and coughed. "I mean, my mom was too busy thinking about her ex to think about what I did after school, so… she didn't drink, or take drugs, she just… wasn't there." Jade was surprised to see Henry give her an understanding nod, the "been there, done that" kind. She was tempted to comment on it, but decided to continue the story instead. "Social serviced showed up from time to time, but then she just… snapped out of it for some hours. Made pancakes and coffee, all that. I just played along, because some of the kids I knew on the streets were in homes, and I heard the stories."

Jade swallowed, and looked away from her fence. "So… sophomore year. I was caught um… borrowing some lunch money, and they called my mom to pick me up. It had been snowing the night before and mom wasn't the steadiest driver. They called me from the hospital, made me stay the night, and the next day…" Her words trailed out, simply because she had no idea how to continue the story. Jade bit her tongue, held it in place to be sure she could say the next without making any unusual sound. Finally she ended with "I didn't want to get tangled all up in the system, so I left. Changed my name and came here."

"What about them?" Henry asked, pointing his index finger upwards.

A lure smile formed on Jade's face. "Are you familiar with the Quinitin Rubies?"

"Yeah… Hollister took them from the Fallers after driving them out of the city. He used it as an example on his power. Got it locked up in a safe in his offices… why?" Henry ended, looking curious on what would come next.

"Well, now it's just an empty safe." Jade gave away a lure smirk, which was quickly mirrored by Henry's surprisingly alike grin.

"You broke the honor code?"

"Oh, please!" She started, laughing a little. "Like there is one!" When he didn't reply, but sent her a look that told her that he believed there were people out there who still trusted honor codes amongst thieves, Jade was starting to defend her actions. "It was my first steal! I thought if I started off with someone who can't report it to the police, I would be safe!"

He snickered with some kind of dark humor at that. "So you started off with people who likes to see you dead instead."

"I didn't say it was a perfect plan."

"Not perfect?" Henry looked like he was trying to take it in. "It's the mob. I'm betting you already have a bounty on what, ten thousands by now?"

Jade didn't say anything for some seconds, looking down at her lap. "It's more along the lines of twenty-five…" She mumbled, and quickly continued before he could cut in with some kind of mad input along the lines of what Marcus had given her when she came to him with the diamonds. "But I learned! I know how to trick the feds now!"

"Oh, really?" His voice had grown to some kind of cold calmness in the low tones they had allowed themselves to speak with since they got there. "You didn't give them any hints about you in the gallery? Forgetting to unplug the cameras, letting a guard see you, leave a fing-"

Jade cut him off. "I'm not an amateur! I was wearing a mask, all the guards were drugged, and I was wearing gloves!"

"Really?" He egged her along, but Jade didn't even care anymore. If that guy was implying that she couldn't steal two valuable paintings from a museum… "Because I haven't seen the painting yet, and I'm starting to doubt if you really have it."

She made an indignant exhale, like an elephant coughing, while letting her jaws part. "I snuck into that gallery, used drugs on all the guards, skipped over the lasers and hooked those paintings off. It was a Rembrandt, _and_ a Matisse. I rolled the canvases together and pushed them into the tube, _then_ I skipped over the lasers and walked right out. I didn't need to turn off the security tapes, because all the guards were drugged and I was wearing a _mask_! And you can check it up with the security footage if you want."

When she was done, the satisfaction she had felt over the rant quickly dreaded, replaced with confusion over the smile that she hadn't seen growing in Henry's face since she started. Her worry increased when he picked up his phone and started texting like mad on it.

"What are you doing?" Jade asked, letting the slight suspicion that was coming over her show in her face.

"I found us a way out of here," was his only reply as he continued texting.

"Bull. You can't get out without a SWAT team, I told you!" Jade forced herself to relax after the whispering outburst, but that wasn't easy, because Henry had just added a couple of molars in his smile, which absolutely freaked her out.

"Who said I didn't have a SWAT team?"

**New chapter on Wednesday. Stay tuned.**


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10 - Neal

"You son of-"

Neal smiled, and turned off the recorder on his smartphone to avoid the last part being played in court. If looks could kill, Virginia Baker over there would be wanted for murder too, Neal thought, a little malicious. He didn't say anything, though he probably should, because she started to crawl around in their little room. Her hands were running professionally over the cables, and Neal was suspecting she was trying to find a way out of there (which wasn't good, because his confidence on no-one escaping was what kept this arrest together).

"What are you doing?" He asked, keeping all worry from his face and voice.

"Getting myself out of here." She replied shortly, stopping on some of the cables going down in the floor. They were the biggest coil in the little space Neal and Virginia had crept into, and the hole was just about fat enough for a very slim thief to slip through.

"What's down there, Virginia?" Neal pointed at the floor, struggled to keep the unmoved mask together, and at the same time slipped out her FBI nickname. He wasn't expecting her to know some random thief movie from the nineties, let alone know the main character.

"Seriously? Entrapment?" She looked up from whatever she was doing to those cables, and added, more to herself than to Neal "You guys need to come up with better nicknames…" She pulled some more cables. "Down here is the cable floor or just floor C if you like. Most TV stations has one, to keep track of their tech. There's only stairs down here, because people only get down here for…" She pulled the cables upwards and revealed a hole that was thin enough for a very slim person to fit through with some squeezing, but thanks to Neal's new habit of going to the gym every Thursday, there was no way he was going to fit. "…Maintenance."

The girl quickly gathered her things, the purse and the phone she had put on the floor. Her frown had by the time she had pulled the cables up, turned to a small, satisfied smile, very much like Neal's own when he used a backup plan to get out of a tricky situation. Something malicious sounded in her voice. "If it makes you feel any better, Nark, I always knew I could get out of here alone."

And before Neal could stop her, she had slipped down the hole and out of sight. It took him one moment of confusion to understand that she had actually done this, before he called Peter.

"She's slipped out, Peter!" Neal shouted at the second he got a hold of his partner on the phone.

"How?" Peter asked, and Neal could hear him running through the building. "You said the room was secure!"

"She found an alternate route!" Neal couldn't believe he had been tricked by that little girl, and white Peter and the rest of the team took down the two mobsters that had chased them, and got Neal out of the room underneath the tiles, the FBI searched the building from bottom to top floor.

They found the cable floor, eventually, but not a sign of their Virginia Baker anywhere. After five hours of mapping the entire building, which Neal found out actually was an old TV-station, just recently sold to somewhere else. Neal was internally impressed. Placing the painting like that, having planned an escape route so big was really good, even compared to Neal's grand escapes in the past (Neal wasn't going to say this out loud, but he _liked_ the way she was thinking).

When his phone, along with the painting they found in the hotel next door, had been logged into evidence (after Neal had deleted everything Mozzie related from his phone, of course), and the FBI had searched the entire building for life, and forfeited, Peter and Neal retreated back to Federal Plaza, and rendezvoused in Peter's office.

It was miserable, reviewing everything that had gone wrong, but Peter meant it was "necessary for future decisions" and also that "it was how I caught you." Neal found these debriefings to be boring, because he knew exactly what he _had _done wrong, and also made a future reference to never tell the suspect he was FBI unless it was really necessary. Gloating counted as unnecessary. That pretty much was everything he needed to do to get hold of his mistakes.

While Neal seemed frustrated with losing the suspect, Peter seemed to rather enjoy it. Neal liked the outsmarting part, but when he was outsmarted back… that wasn't usual, and Neal spent the rest of the day with this little frown while he tried to solve this puzzle. Peter, on the other hand, was smiling widely, telling Neal that it was the best part of the job and so on. Neal knew where he was getting at, but his urge to get this girl was just because she had humiliated him in front of the entire department.

It all got held off by Elizabeth practically ordering Peter to get home to dinner, as soon as he had gotten the warrants to from the DOJ. Neal was, _accidentally_, in the same room as Peter when he had it on speaker, and got himself invited too. That suited him just fine, this Virginia Baker was a real headache, and they both needed a break, after chasing down dead ends for the rest of the day.

Elizabeth had made chicken dinner, and had also brought herself through the trouble of inviting a reluctant Mozzie. The dinner was great, but it didn't take long until Neal and Peter started to discuss work again, and Elizabeth pretending to be interested and starting up a conversation about her client's little baby girl ruining the party she was catering.

"It's just very rarely we get to see someone with a so throughout escape-plan that she walks into another building, and easily escapes two tails in a row."

"She's good. And that's why it's fun to catch her." Peter encountered, zipping some of Mozzie's wine.

"I get that, but don't you just want to beat her?"

"You sound a lot like Peter when he was after you." Elizabeth smiled, and started gathering plates. Mozzie got up and started helping her.

"Oh, no he's just mad because he got outsmarted by a blondie." Peter joked.

Neal just laughed. "My mother was a blondie, and she made me. I think the teenager thing is more pressing. She's half my age, Peter, she should be half my wits too. Which, of course, is a lot," he joked.

Peter laughed a little at him again before turning serious again. "The thing that annoys me is that when we finally get to her hiding spot in the university, she'll already be long gone."

"Warrant time," Neal suddenly changed his face back to a lure smile.

"What?"

"It's a small window of time, Suit!" Mozzie called from the kitchen. "The window of opportunity, so to speak. The time it takes for a fed to get a warrant. The time you have to disappear."

"And how do you know how long it takes for a fed to get a warrant?" Peter asked, innocently.

No reply came from the kitchen, so Neal took it upon himself to answer that one. "That depends on the feds connection to a judge." His voice strongly indicated that he didn't want to go deeper into the subject. It also indicated that there might be some incriminating items mixed into this knowledge.

"What do you think will be her next stop?" Peter asked, putting that topic on ice.

"I don't know. If I was her, I'd leave the state, or even the country. She won't be anywhere near New York by now, if she hasn't got any other reason to stay."

"So we've lost her?" Peter asked, picking up his and Elle's wineglass and his own. Neal took his and Mozzie's glass, along with the half empty wine bottle and sat them down at the living room table.

"I'm pretty sure we have. The next time we'll get her is the next time she does something."

"And you think she'll do that?" Peter sat down.

Neal pulled his own glass to his "She's an addict. Give her time and she will."

"How old did you say she was, Neal, like nineteen?" Elizabeth sat down in one of the chairs and got her glass back from her husband.

Neal shrugged. "I honestly don't know. Could be anywhere between thirteen and twenty, she's amazing with the make-up." He took a zip of his wine and added something that he just remembered. "She told me she was turning seventeen, but I don't know if that is reliable."

Peter sighed. "What's a kid at seventeen doing outside of school?"

"Stealing paintings, apparently." Mozzie told him.

Neal shrugged. "I started when I was eighteen, it's not that far away." He took a zip of his wine, and added "allegedly, of course," when he saw Mozzie's face.

"Right," Peter said, as Elizabeth nodded with a smile on her lips. They were used to this style of talking by now.

Elizabeth picked up the thread where Neal had left it. "But who allowed this to happen? I mean, there is a system for a reason, isn't there? Somebody must've noticed that the kid wasn't showing up to school anymore."

"The system's corrupt, Mrs. Suit." The conspirator in the group of four said, to nobody's surprise.

"You grew up in an orphanage." Neal pointed out, and, after another staring over the brim of Mozzie's glasses, he added "Allegedly." Why he had to add that was a little unclear, the FBI had records of him admitting to just that.

Peter took the time to place the wine glass on the table, looking over at his wife. "The system either works fine or doesn't work." He told her, placing his arm on the top of the couch. "I've seen kids come in and out of my office, and you just _know_ when they are coming back for something else. It may be the social worker, or the foster family, or the kid itself, but when something doesn't go smoothly, they make sure you pay for your mistakes. And theirs too, if they have the chance."

Elizabeth frowned. "It's so sad, people just giving up on them, you know." She took another zip of her wine, as to drown her sorrows in the alcohol. "Someone should do something about it." Neal knew she had this newfound interest in children, from where he didn't know, but he guessed it had something to do with Elizabeth's sister visiting last week, along with the Burkes niece, a cute little six-year-old called Bonnie, and a question hovering over them. Why weren't they in the business of raising a child yet?

Mozzie sent a look over to his long-time partner in crime. "She still believes in the power of humanity," he said, as if someone adult discussed a child's delusion about Santa Claus.

Neal laughed, considering bringing up one of the many conspiracies Mozzie liked to believe, but dropping it. It wasn't worth the long explanations. On the other hand, Neal didn't feel like talking about burn-out childhood memories, so he turned the conversation to the party Elizabeth was catering for, picking up where she tried to start a conversation earlier. The topic was a little too depressive to talk about in this setting, in any setting for that matter.

**Well, so I know the whole TV-station might seem a little far-fetched, but my uncle works in one and over there, they had a cable floor, and a tiny floor for the fans to the servers under the tiles, like it is in the story. It's a year since he showed me, but I think I'm accurate enough in the description.**

**I've started school, so late updates might me more frequent from now on, I'll have to see how that goes. It's my last year, and I want to get as good grades I could possibly get, soooooo….**

**THIRDLY, thanks for the support. I mean, I know it's not much compared to other stories here, but followers, reviewers and favoriters alike, I love y'all to death. Keep being awesome and great things will happen (like me updating :D)**

**FOURTHLY (if that is even a thing) I saw a very similar story called "the sister" or something surface on here, and I'd like to address that for anyone who would ever wonder. IT'S GREAT! I don't have any rights connected to my story, I'm ripping off White Collar completely, just adding my own character and backstory into the mix, so for anyone to be inspired by my story (if that is even the case) is, capital letters, AWESOME. I write stories I'd like to see be written, most of the time, and for others to give their take on a brother/sister relationship between Neal and an OC, is fun to read, simply put.**

**So.**

**See ya next week.**

**-CoolCoke**


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11 - Jade

Jade was running.

She liked taking a run when things messed themselves up, and the night was, in her opinion, the best time to do it. Although she had seen three addicts, five drunks and a robbery through her slamming shoes in the asphalt, through the city that truly never slept, she wasn't afraid for a second. She knew how to defend herself. Those people were part of holding the normal away from the street. The entire city changed in the night because of them.

Jade hadn't been sleeping, and whenever she couldn't sleep, she went out for a run. She had changed her location to a dorm room in NYU's residence hall. Her alias, Jenny Kutcher was an art graduate at twenty one and had moved into her dorm room right after she got kicked out of her apartment because a relative of her landlord was going to have it. Out of sheer luck (or just a heavy lot of persuasion), a spot opened up for her, a dorm she shared with two others, where none of them were fellow art student, that could ask her about the curriculum.

Jade had snuck out from that room at the middle of the night, after trying, and failing, to sleep. Yesterday had been… nightmare-ish. Since as long as she could remember she hated not being in control of things. Jade had been controlled around since she was a little girl, with Marshalls running around above her head, ordering her to sit down while the adults fixed things above her. As she grew older, she knew the people around her had an eye in on her actions, on where she went, seemingly for her own protection. She knew how it felt like to not have control.

And tonight… tonight had been the top of losing control, the top of everything bad that had happened to her since those _stupid_ diamonds were stolen. Marcus was dead. Her painting wasn't sold. Henry was a fed. The mob knew she had stolen those paintings, probably by Marcus himself.

Jade was still standing, but she was standing alone. Thinking about it was absolutely terrifying, so instead she focused on the running.

Thump, thump, thump. Her shoes made a steady rhythm that travelled from her feet, through the legs and ended up in her hips. Every single step was making her even more short of breath than she was before, but she didn't feel like stopping. Not yet. Right now she felt like she could go on forever.

Since when had everything gone so wrong? She had no trustworthy fence left, a hacker that currently was pulling off a job in Beijing, and the rest of the criminal friends she had in Portland! She couldn't even have her stuff in the same place as where she slept, because no normal art student had their entire family stuck in a couple of boxes. Tears started to form in her eyes, and she brushed them away at once. Something that would make her feel better was stealing something, but unless she could get to another fence than Richard in the coffee cart, she couldn't sell her loot, and holding on to evidence was stupid. Almost as stupid as robbing the mob was.

_The good parts, Jade, remember the good things._ She had two hundred thousand in her bank account that she easily could live off, but that wouldn't last long. She also had her aliases intact, except from Andrea, and could use them until Eric came back to NY in a couple of weeks, and could imprint her new ones in the database.

She had a pretend life as an art student in this university, which was weird, considering she hadn't even finished high school, and was about ten years younger than her classmates.

Not that school had been any hard in the first place, Jade had moved from CP class to CP class in her freshman year, searching for something that was a little bit challenging. Most of the things they taught here, she had already been through several times, both by herself and through school, although school wasn't really trying to challenge her. Their goal was to occupy her for the x amount of hours she had to be there.

She was approaching the university again, short of breath, and so tired, she felt like falling over at once she stopped running. She didn't, but when her feet moved over to a quick pace, and she sneaked into the room she shared with two sound asleep girls in their beds (probably also about ten years older than Jade herself), she managed to stay still, swaying a little out of exhaustion, but other than that, silent as a mouse.

She grabbed a towel from her emergency bag and made her way to the showers (although she got lost twice along the way). Her watch showed around three when she found them, and thinking she should probably enjoy her last moment on this campus alone, she walked inside. The showers were hot and full of steam, something she found a little weird for the middle of the night. Not really awake enough to care any further, she placed her little bag of toiletries in the little open space on the sink.

A door opened in the mirror covered with fog from another hot shower behind her, and someone stepped out of one of the showers. Jades eyes widened when she understood what it was. An opposite gendered person just had stepped, fully exposed, out of the shower and was currently wrapping a towel around his body.

Right between a laugh at the ridiculous situation and an awkward stare at nothing at all while he finished covering up his junk, Jade felt uncomfortable. She ended up at a wide eyed stare into the boys eyes, which showed neither of her real feelings, and looked really creepy in a third perspective.

The boy finally looked up and met her eyes, and she turned red in a second. Jade Brooks never turned red.

"Like what you're seeing?" He asked, a little teasingly.

Jade clamped her mouth shut at once she realized it was open, and pulled herself together enough to say "Isn't this the girls shower?"

"I believe so, yes." The foreign guy turned back into the shower and pulled out five different bottles of different substances. She started considering the fact that he was gay.

"And why is there a boy in the girls shower, I may ask?"

"Let me guess… You're new?"

Jade didn't see what that had to do with him being in an otherwise deserted shower for the opposite sex in the middle of the night. "Moved in today."

"Right. You see, girly, the first thing some idiot did when getting here was to paint a skirt on the man to lure you guys to come in here." He smiled, and went over to stand uncomfortably close to her while looking himself in the mirror.

Jade recalled the doors inside to the shower, and made a fake smile. "So there were two male showers before?"

One heartbeat, and the guy sent a sheepish smile to her. "That's what I thought," Jade said, smiling back at him, before going back to what she was supposed to do, which was trying to find the shampoo in between her hairbrush and make-up.

"So what is a nice-looking girl like you doing here in the middle of the night?" The guy placed himself next to Jade, using the foggy mirror on her left side. He had brought some kind of products too, some kind of cream that he applied to his face. Again, Jade questioned his sexuality. She wasn't really comfortable with that whole nudity thing either, and the fact that she was in an old Cincinnati Reds tee and skinny tights, both stinking with sweat, in the same bathroom as a guy who, by some weird reason, seemed to hit on her, with only a towel to cover up his crotch.

Jade had been through a series of… special circumstances, but this one took the cake. A wedding cake with three stories and ornaments in marzipan.

"I came back from a robbery at 3rd street. Became a little hot by running from all the cops, so I thought I'd go for a shower before I go to bed." Her voice was pitched perfectly serious, like he was an accomplice who drove her home. She also pulled an impressive smile at him, while placing the shampoo bottle on the sink.

He made a "pfhh" sound in disbelief. "And I am the king of Scotland."

"Scotland has no king."

"Exactly."

A small pause, while they both stood in front of the mirror, doing their thing. Apparently, the boy wasn't really satisfied with her answer before, so he started up a new conversation. "Are you a freshman?" He asked.

"No. Sophomore. I had a flat by my own before, but I got thrown out." She went with the tear-jerking story she had told the woman responsible for housing.

"Thrown out? How is that possible?"

"My landlord, some weird dude with a beard, wrote in small letters that I could be thrown out with 24 hours' notice. A friend came into town, and was going to rent from him. Hauled right into the street." It was a nice story, believable, and still sad and all that, enough to get someone to give you what you wanted.

"So you couldn't shower before now, because you've been too busy moving?"

"No, I was done with that hours ago." She quickly replied. Technically speaking, she had everything she needed to go shower, but this guy was fun to talk to. She really didn't want to go in just yet. "I just needed a run. Clear my thoughts."

It was silent for a while.

"So, do you date juniors?"

_Wow, that escalated quickly_! Jade hid her confused frown in an ironic smile. "So you're not gay then?" She answered, a little cockier than she felt, and also a little lower than how she usually would have said it. This was the absolute first time _anyone_ had asked her on a date! Her first was a hot college guy.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Silence.

"You didn't answer my question." He said, after they had stared into each other's eyes for a while, him probably trying to make out what she just had said, she staring into his eyes, just observing the colors, and playing the blinking game with him.

"Not if I could help it." Jade started gathering up her stuff and moving towards the showers.

"Then you'll make an exception for me." He smiled playfully, and she replied with an identical one.

"In your dreams!" She opened the door to the shower closest to her and went inside. She heard him doing some stuff outside of the shower, but didn't mind once the hot water hit her hair.

She started minding when she was done with the shower, went outside, and saw that in the fog on the mirror was replaced by a series of numbers on the mirror, along with the text "Call me". She rolled her eyes at the cliché move, but she also, for some reason she didn't know, saved the number on her phone.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12 - Jade

_If I were a little girl on the run from the feds, where would I hide?_ That question had bothered Neal ever since he and Peter had ended up empty-handed on their con barely a week ago. Neal could count the cases he and Peter _hadn't_ closed using just two hands, and be just fine with that, but there was something else with this girl.

"She's the miniature version of you," Peter had said one time they had grabbed a bite from the cart outside of Federal Plaza. "That's why it bothers you. You see yourself in her, and it bothers you."

He wasn't really sure if it was supposed to comfort him, or explain why he was so bothered with not finding her, but he hated her attitude either way. More so, he could relate to her. Not the style and techniques, Neal preferred a little more original move to get past the lasers and all, but the thing with the poisoning, which he would disregard at once because of difficulties like bringing your coffee to work or buying coffee. She had been a Neal-thinker, kept the opinion and successfully used it to break into the place and steal those paintings. It was funny, really, comparing himself to her, because their methods were so _alike_. He hadn't really thought of that before.

"How would you know if it bothers me?" Neal asked after swallowing his piece of bagel.

Peter just returned his lure smile, and led the way through the pair of glass doors that was the only architectural highlight in the boring grey building Neal had been working in for the last two years. Not that he had expressed his dislike for the square windows, the dead color, the plainly stream of the grey suited people that had been his enemies for years before this change for anyone, he simply kept it to himself, for some day he could sit down with the architect, if that guy hadn't killed himself for the terrible design yet. Neal rarely complained to a room of people capable of throwing him in jail, especially about something that they apparently appreciated so highly, considering the amount of time that was spent here.

"It bothers me," He said after a while, while they waited the slow numbers to change to 1, so they could get into the slowest elevator made in the earth (another downside with this place, although it could be a plus if you wanted a place to change quickly from janitor to businessman). His tone was so serious that Peter turned his head and looked at him. Neal kept his mask for another second, before he cracked a joking smile. "Our closure rate is now 93,8%, if we're not careful, we'll be down in the eighties soon."

"You couldn't bear with that shame could you?" Peter joked back, as the elevator _ding_ed, finally, and the duo stood back to let a clerk with a bunch of papers stacked on a trolley out, before entering, along with five other suited guys, and a woman Neal just _happened _ to know was named Caroline Hollis, working on 32nd, in the Home Invasions' unit.

"Admit it, neither could you."

They shared a smile, and Peter added a "_that's right"_ nod to his "Then we better catch the next one."

"Will do, boss."

When they arrived at the office, it was the normal buzz that was about the only positive thing about the place. Agents running from point A to B, which usually was from the copy machine to their desk, with small pit stops around C, the small improvised kitchen that was in the middle. To be honest, Neal loved this action. Just watching them work, all of the people that he had hated once in his life, and now was part of his extended family. Every time he went through those glass doors, he would remember that first time (or second, if you count his arrest, which… doesn't count) he went in here. The stares, Peter introducing him to all these random people with curt supposedly polite smiles, shaking his hand, and checking their pockets immediately after. Like Neal would steal something the first day there.

But it was also something intriguing about it all, this _society_ he suddenly was a part of, something he never had found anywhere else, except from the times he conned himself into a job, before slipping out again. Neal smiled a little at the fact that his first real job had been straight to FBI, with Christmas dinners, cake schedules, and a nice fruit basket delivered every Friday being the highlight of the day. It was such a different view on the 9 to 5 that he had imagined. Sure, he had worked for Adler, but only as a behind-the-scenes guy, someone who came, spoke, and collected (empty) checks. It was comforting, at the same time terrifying to watch himself adapt to the 9-5, and the permanent desk in the far corner of the office. Neal hadn't had this sort of permanent since he lived at home, after moving from home, he had moved everywhere and anywhere, both in an attempt to escape the truth and evade the law. It scared him to get too attached to the people around him, too attached to leave. But of course he wasn't going to admit that to anyone.

"Peter!" Agent Clinton Jones called from the other end of the office, and Neal was torn out of his old memories. His handler seemed to be busy with some thinking too, because he jumped a little when his name was called.

"Yeah?"

Neal sensed an I-need-you-to-sign-this-conversation, and moved directly to his desk in order to avoid that. He knew that Peter got a little hung up in the details of the surveillance equipment, and that blue file looked like it contained just that. He had some paperwork to catch up on anyway.

Neal didn't really enjoy the stacks of reports, cases and so on at his desk, the most exciting about them was practicing others handwriting or, if he was by the computer, sneak peak at cat videos at YouTube, enjoying the small rebellion. There was rarely a problem with writing them, he was just bored out of his mind reporting every single detail of what he had done the last week. And this new case… Well, it was another way for Peter to torture him.

But Neal had a cunning plan to get this over with in a much funnier way. He was going to rhyme the report. But not normal rhyme, but the Viking alliteration that was almost undetectable. Viking alliteration was a form of writing where the stressed syllables had the same first consonant, or a different vowel. Just like the Peter Piper one.

Neal smiled a little, and a fond childhood memory washed over him from nowhere, and took him right back to that green living room of Ellen's, his little sister Jade on his lap, pointing at him, and exclaiming " 'Nell! 'Nell!"

He had laughed, smiled widely and asked her if she could say the nursery rhyme Ellen had taught him at three. And she had listened closely before laughing when he speeded it up.

Blinking rapidly to get his mind back on the file in front of him, Neal managed to write down the first line. It was a long time he even had given her a thought, he reflected. Except from Ellen, who had taunted his brain since her death, his old family was in another dimension, a dimension he had left sixteen years ago. Sure, he sometimes remembered his mom, and sent her a thought, wherever she was, but Jade… She had been a year, and remembering that he had a kid sister out there was hard sometimes. He had loved her, of course, but he had also never really… thought of her as a person? He didn't know. Maybe it was because she had been too small to make relations.

He had written a couple of lines when someone knocked at the desk in front of him. Neal looked up.

"You're actually doing paperwork. That paper isn't due before Friday, Neal." It was Peter. Of course it was Peter. He was one of the only people in the world who would direct his joke to high school.

"You should film me." Neal returned the smile, and put down the pen. "What's up?"

Peter threw a file with all the distinctive White Collar traces on them. Coffee mug ring, bent paperclips, all the usual. Neal opened it, and looked down at the visuals that had been given to him. A nice painting caught his eye, those brush strokes looked very good, he'd have to try that coloring combination at home…

"Alana Humphrey got a threat about her Monet yesterday. She wants us to be at her party." Neal got torn right out of his dream world in a second.

"Does she?" Neal was disappointed at once. Stakeouts in the van wasn't his favorite, although he _could_ find a way to sneak past the security to get a peek at the art. It just needed a nice uniform, some tools and a nice distraction…

"Neal?" Peter snapped his fingers in front of his face, and Neal jerked back to reality. "What is wrong with you today?"

Once again Neal tried to focus at the problem at hand. He also made an attempt to answer Peter's question. "Sorry. Mozzie dragged me through a full version about how NASA was built on top of an alien base last night. He kept me up to 3 am."

"I've never heard that one before."

Neal nodded. "It's one of his own. He also shortened my collection of Côte du Rhone by a bottle."

"I have yet to understand why you keep your wine collection at your apartment." Peter smiled, and blinked a few times before he got back on topic. "The painting, a Monet, not one of his most famous…"

"… But still a remarkable painting." Neal cut in. "How did she get to know about the threat?"

"Her bodyguard had some connections. The party was specially set up for her to promote it before an auction; Alana's mother willed it to her after her death in late May…"

"…That's almost a year ago, what took them so long?" Peter sent Neal an annoyed glance when he got cut off for the second time.

"The brother claimed the fortune after some mess with the inheritance. Quite the family feud, look at the lawsuit." Peter leaned over and flipped some pages of the file that still was in Neal's hands, before pointing at a paper.

"Well, she won, didn't she?" Neal turned to his handler.

Peter nodded. "Well, yeah, but he was still bitter about it all."

"So the working theory is that the brother has hired someone to steal it for him?" Neal immediately flipped the pages back to the painting when Peter removed his hand. It was a remarkable painting, a woman in blue with a little kid by her feet, both sunken in their own thoughts. From early in his career, Neal thought, Monet made portraits before he turned to painting nature. This had both, and it was stunning.

The child was plump and cute, and maybe because of his small flashback a couple of minutes ago, Neal turned his thoughts again over to Jade. Huh. Twice in one day was unusual. Just like his mother, Andrea, Sophie, Josh and all the other people he used to know from his past in Saint Louis, they seemed to fade the more time passed.

"Yup." Peter replied. "We have three invitations. Jones is in the van while we and Diana infiltrate the party."

Neal felt like it was Christmas. He got to go on a party, with a Monet, while catching some second rate hired criminal. Never mind the nine-to-fives, he loved his job.

**Jade up next and her romance with mr. Mystery man.  
Also just want to give a quick shout-out to the author of Honest Lies, GiraffePanda2. You shouted me out so I only think it's fair to do the same. THe story is awesome and you should check it out if you like orphaned female protagonists ;)**


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13 – Jade

«Benjamin Lunar.»

Jade made a smug smirk, and crossed her legs in the bed, while answering in a southern accent. "Yeah, hello there, this is Brittany Kepler from maintenance. I'm just callin' out to make you know a complaint about destruction of school property has been issued." She kept her voice straight, but her smile just grew with every word. Good thing this was over the phone, or she would already been sold.

"What? Destruction of property?" His voice sounded sleepy, like the phone just woke him up. Oops. Jade hadn't really considered the possibility that people woke up later than 10.

"On January 29th, you vandalized a bathroom on campus. You wrote your number on the mirror. You are in violation of section twelve B, that says students of different sex are not allowed to publicly flirt or exchange numbers on bathroom mirrors after 2 am."

It was silent for a while. Then, he made a short laugh. "Oh, ha-ha, very funny."

Jade tilted to the left and ended up lying on the side on her bed, her elbow propped up against her chin. She changed her accent back to normal and said "I know, I'm hilarious."

"Right. Did you consider that someone might get a little sleep in the weekends?"

She shrugged, which of course had no effect whatsoever on Benjamin. He couldn't see her. "I'm more of a morning person."

"Wow. If this relationship is going to work, we need to set some phoning times." Jade could hear on his voice that he was joking.

"I feel like this "relationship" goes backwards. First you show me your crotch, then call me your girlfriend... I'm not very good at these things, but I'm pretty sure we did something wrong."

There was a second of silence on the other end. "Well then." He said finally. "What about this. I take you out on a restaurant downtown, where we can discuss this further, Mystery Girl."

"A- Jenny." She stuttered, almost using her old name. "Jenny Kutcher. And yours is Benjamin?"

"Well everyone calls me Ben, so…"

Jade laughed a little. "We're doing it again."

"Doing what?"

"Going backwards. Add getting to know each other's names on the list."

Ben laughed back. "Right. So what d'ya say, Jenny? Does Thursday sound good to you?"

The smile that was left of her laugh from earlier widened. "Sure. In the yard at eight?"

"You've got it, Mystery Girl."

"'Key, bye." Jade's voice was fast, and she pressed the red button on her phone, ending the conversation. The smile she had managed to restrain to her lips grew to her eyes and she rolled around to her back, almost about to scream in excitement. She had actually landed her first date!

"Relax, will ya?" Jade abruptly moved her head to the door, where one of her roommates, Mathilda, stood. "You look like a teenager."

Jade's smile vanished at once. "Am I not allowed to?"

"You are, but you were getting that Demi Lovato smile, and I feared the squeal coming right after. My ears just can't handle that."

"Right." Jade stood up from her bed, and headed over her little shelf, where all her books stood. All of them were Jenny Kutchers curriculum (made especially by Eric cooperation). She had for the first time actually showed up in classes, which was to the surprise of her peers ("We thought you were going to be crawling in here around exams, this is a couple of months early!") Classes were going well, she had a lot of fun in the lectures, the teachers were good and interesting… It was almost like Jade wanted to quit Jade, and just be Jenny for the rest of her life.

But phst… that was ridiculous. Jade lived for her nightly crimes. She wouldn't change it up with anything. She took one of her books out of the shelf, and lay down on the bed with it. Mathilda sat down at her desk to the right of her bed and opened her laptop. A mutual silence fell over them, as Mathilda started typing and Jade read in her book.

A couple of minutes later, Kimberly came inside. Jade knew she had a boyfriend, and liked to spend the weekends with him, so it surprised her to see her there. She also sat down and started to study, not saying a word. Not that there was anything wrong with that, Jade appreciated the silence, reading about Michelangelo, her elbow propped up, supporting her cheekbone. She didn't really realize it herself, but she was slowly sinking down on the pillow the book lay on, despite her arm's lost battle against it.

It took her a long time to figure out that her eyes had shut by themselves, and her mind had wandered off to distant places.

The dream started good. It was a beautiful childhood memory, the park across the street that Ellen used to take her to. She and Ellen sat in the sunlight as kids fought over a soccer ball right in front of them. Someone else was there too; he had a strange and handsome face and looked around thirty. His face was awfully familiar to Marcus'. _Daniel_, she thought, and smiled softly as he wrapped his arm around her shoulder. The brown hair had a military cut, and she asked him where he had been. He just laughed, answering an obvious _I'm right here_, and Jade tried again.

_Where were you guys?_ She asked, but the reply was simple, from both of them. _I've always been here_, Daniel answered, while Ellen joked about how they should get her to the doctor. Finally, she gave up and stretched a little on the bench, again watching the kids fighting over the ball. A little child with black bouncy ringlets raised her hands high in the air and ran across the field when she scored. Jade followed her with her gaze, and saw the mother, sitting at the bench at the left for theirs, embrace her daughter in a warm congratulating hug.

When Jade turned her head back, someone else had joined the party. Her mother's eyes looked tired, but she smiled at Jade and Daniel before sitting down beside Jade's brother. She just watched, but when she managed to muster a smile from one of the kids at around two playing at the jungle gym, Jade knew she wasn't the mother she grew up with. She was in her happiest state, nothing could ruin anything.

Then, suddenly, she heard a _shush_, from somewhere right by her right side, and she turned. Danny had his eyes wide open, like he had seen something incredible, and then started choking. She could hear the concern in the echo of her voice, asking him _Danny, are you okay?_ before the blood started coming out from his mouth. Her eyes panned down his chest, seeing the blood ooze from there too. There was blood _everywhere_! She wanted to shriek, she wanted to cry, but all she could was just look. Then she looked away, seeing a man, dressed in a suit, black as the night, gun in his hand, standing right behind Danny. His face was the one that had been haunting her forever, the kind that stuck itself into her brain, and burned a permanent mark there. The perfect painted portrait hanging behind the counter she took the key to the safe from. The safe that held the diamonds.

She felt so helpless, as she looked over to her mother, also with the red color splattered all over that beautiful sunny dress she had put on for the occasion. Her eyes were big and red with fear, and Jade could see the emptiness she had seen in her mother after the car accident, in the hospital bed. Someone started pulling in her, and Jade turned to Ellen, whose eyes were wide in shock. She got pulled over the street, which she recognized as her home in Portland. Ellen pulled her inside, as they both could hear the shouting and rambling from Hollister himself behind her. It was mostly a blur, as the scenery changed to the little place she had stayed in last week when she ran in one door, and to the hotel she had stashed away the painting the next.

They went in another door, and crashed into someone. Jade chocked on her own breath when she saw the familiar face. Henry, the fake FBI buyer who both had her identified and heard her confession, stood there, still as a statue. Jade panicked, looking around the room for Ellen to show her to another door, to help her out, but Ellen was gone, and Jade was stuck, and Henry and Hollister closed in on her, while discussing in loud voices.

_I was first_, Hollister argued, loud voice and angry eyes. Henrys kind ocean blue eyes had narrowed to blue slices and his smile wasn't welcoming anymore, it was mean. Out to hurt her, just like the gun he just removed the safety on. _I'm getting the privilege, I'm a fed,_ he replied. Their voices grew louder, the guns pointed at her grew bigger, they moved closer, until…

**BAM.**

Jade didn't jump, she just opened her eyes, let the eyes that already were used to the darkness move from side to side in the dorm room. She made a sharp inhale when she saw Henry stand in the corner of her room, aiming at her with the gun in his hand. The rapid blink she did in reflex made him vanish, but the fear was still there, making her limbs unable to move, too scared to function.

_Nightmare_, she thought, trying to make her brain understand that this was nothing to be afraid of. _It was just a nightmare._ It didn't help much, so she just lay there, unable to move, while trying to come up with good ways to relax her muscles. She settled with a nursery rhyme about a dinosaur, that she whispered out in the night, afraid she would wake the others in her room. It made her arms function, and she dared slipping her hand under the pillow to take the gun that was there, and then further proceed to go out of bed.

She didn't want to go running, Jade was too tired, but she wanted to do something, so she ended up downstairs in the cellar, soaring though all the stuff that wasn't in her room already, including the boxes she always brought with her. After some minutes, she found what she wanted. A small written note from Ellen to her mom. If she flipped it, there was the top of Daniels report card from eleventh grade, all A's. Jade had originally brought it in the box for that reason, but the note behind had caught her attention in June last year, and now it was on the top of the first box. It read:

_Gone to pick up Danny from school. Mind starting dinner? It's in the fridge just cook some eggs to go with it. Me and Danny will come with the sauce when were done, but it will take some time. He says he hasn't done anything, but you know him.  
-Ellen_

Jade managed to smile a little. Every time she saw this, her own troubles seemed to disappear. It was such a harmless moment, but with that little hint of personality that she used as evidence to prove her argument that Daniel was somewhere in this world, doing things similar to her. She leaned over to the wall, and flipped the card over again. Algebra II, A. The teacher, Mr. Harrolds wrote about his amazing ability to tackle vast numbers and functions in the blink of an eye. CP English, A+. Mrs. Pater said "he is gifted at finding illogical flaws in the big classics, which proves that he reads the books through several times before writing way too long reports", and further on praised him for taking the time, telling him she was writing his college application. She had actually used way smaller scripture to fit everything she wanted to say to Mom and Ellen, but it was cute to read through her desperate scribbling. PE, A. Home economics, A. Jade always had to laugh at that. His teacher and written a humorous little note saying he should relax on the French cuisine, and charming the girls, but rather make pancakes like the lesson plan said.

Her favorite note was on the bottom, the art teacher, who was the last to sign under with an A++, where the last plus was in parentheses, as more of a joke than anything else. Mrs. Taylor, the art teacher, had written in even smaller scripture, using what was left of the page to tell how Danny could be a starving artist, if he wanted to, how his works were filled with depth and understanding she hadn't seen in any other student, and that she doubted she would see again. She told him to work on personality problems, and that, if she didn't know he was pursuing another career, she would easily see him in some big gallery in a few years.

Jade let the note fall down in her lap. That note was everything she wanted to see on her own report card. She had gotten good grades, yes, but she was way too loud with her friends to get anything good and heartfelt from the teachers. Either he was a good talker, or he just was good at listening in school and all that. She had so many days and lessons skipped too, to hang out with her friends in the streets, and smuggle drugs for them. Extra-curricular activities, however, she was less liberal with. Those things were fun, gymnastics, and rock climbing, that she wouldn't miss for a beat, but the rest of classes just seemed so boring and unhelpful, she didn't care much for them. She would rather hang out on the harbor, coughing on cigarettes and practicing to shoot a gun on tin cans. It was more her thing anyways.

Jade sighed out of her own nostalgic self, and turned back to the cardboard box. She carefully placed the report card back into the box, saw the flashlight reflect something far down there, and was about to close it when… That was her painting, the one with NC spelled on. She hadn't put it up in her dorm, because that was Jade's things, not Jenny's. To be fair, her stuff shouldn't even be here, it was too much of a risk. What if anyone saw her with it, or played around with her boxes? It would be a nightmare to no end. She could be figured out, sent to jail... The possibilities were endless, and very few of them promised any good. She closed the box and promised herself to get rid of them all tomorrow. Move to a safer safe house.

But today she was too tired to even move. So she sunk down to the floor and closed her eyes, blinked heavily like before. And just like before, she fell asleep before she knew it.

**I'm tired right now, school from 8.30am to 4pm, a birthday party 'till nine, but I couldn't let you guys down, so here's the next chapter. Congrats, you now know Mr. Mystery's name.**

**I'm gonna go to sleep now.**


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14 - Neal

Mozzie thought Neal was crazy. Of course, after Neal started working for the FBI, he had the feeling that Mozzie thought he was crazy about two times a week, but following the last days, his friends absence had made him worry that Mozzie had started to believe that he was going permanently insane.

Well, he kind of had a good reason. If pre-Neal-anklet-Mozzie had heard Neal had a) worked for the feds, b) enjoyed it and c) actually used his time off to secure a painting that both of them had wanted in their collection for _years_, pre-Neal-anklet-Mozzie would probably un-friend Neal at once and never talk to him again. But then again, that version of his best friend had been more paranoid (delusional if you asked Peter), and less _liberal_ with such things. They both knew now that there were worse things than playing for the cops. Not playing at all for example.

Yet sometimes, the game could turn a little too serious. Neal's games had been fine, but whenever someone brought items like a gun to the game, they ruined all the fun, it was Neal's disadvantage that he didn't like playing with firearm, his toys were amongst the cunning, the slick tongues and the quick wit.

And the painting. Somewhere along with his four year old entrapment, Neal Caffrey had a pretty tough time with himself, several times he had told himself that once he was out, this wasn't worth making copies of paintings, that he would go straight, no cons or lies or forgeries at all. The paintbrush should go down for good. Then, there were the days that Neal would laugh those other days in the face, and dream himself back to the grand moments, the times when the adrenaline rush was the only thing that kept him going, carrying Alex's half-dead body through the streets of Copenhagen, jumping off rooftops or snatching something from someone's pocket. Thankfully, there were most of those days.

If everyone had their drug, the sheer adrenaline he got from danger was Neal's.

And if everything could be cured, then… well, Neal had yet to find his cure. Despite the few days in prison that was very negative towards keeping him on the criminal path, Neal knew he wouldn't imagine his life sweeter than this, conning people on the FBI's bills. He certainly did not expect his life to turn out like this. The anklet was a very small price to pay for this.

Why Neal had started thinking about all these things, he had no explanation for. It was eleven o clock, he was sitting in his beautiful apartment, alone over a painting, and thinking about prison? It was ridiculous of him to even think about the darkest years of his life. The tight community, the high-raised walls to keep him inside, the price to pay for losing in the game against Peter. Such things were stupid to think about, why not take something nice?

Like, imagine how his life had been like if Neal Caffrey stayed Daniel Brooks all his life. If Daniel never had left his mother. Neal always had fun with those thought experiments. He would stay home, get that stupid Valedictorian Speech, Ellen and Ma would cry while he talked about _seizing opportunities_ and _living life to the fullest_, while he, Neal, would just fade away in a dusty yearbook photo, probably ending up with taking a teaching job, or something like that. He would stay home for his sister, Jade, and his mother until he was thirty, or until his mother died, restraining his every move by them. Could he go out today without being afraid of what Ma was going to do while he was gone? Could he trust Jade with a car?

Just imagining his baby sister with a gear stick and a steering wheel (because he would have to make her learn to drive a _real_ car, not that automatic thing they all learned to drive now) seemed weird. Neal would have to hide a lot of his grade A papers when she finally moved over to High School and had to write essays and such. Because he, as the living-in-the-past-guy as he would've been, surely had his picture taped up somewhere in his room, along with all the tests and essays he got a good grade on. He would be making lunch and dinner, driving her to soccer practice and whatnot.

Jade would be about sixteen now, wouldn't she? Neal thought it was scary to think like that, the last time he saw her, she was in diapers, and in his mind, she hadn't aged a bit since he left. Sixteen, that would be old enough to get her driver's license (he hoped she had learned to drive with a manual, even without his guidance). She would probably be in high school too by now… It would be funny just to see where she was, what kind of person she had turned into. Sixteen… Neal tried to find someone to resemble it to in his life. She would be younger than Cindy, June's granddaughter, about the same age as…

Neal's heart skipped a beat.

No, that couldn't be, the chances of that happening were slim to none, that could not be true. Neal pushed the copy he had of the Monet away from himself, and pulled a fresh paper from the stack. Jade Brooks. What was Virginia Baker's name again? Andrea Cross, that was it. Andrea, that was his first client back in fifth grade, but Andrea was a common name, wasn't it? Neal wrote down his sister's name on a paper. Jade Brooks. Then he wrote down Andrea Cross right under it. He hesitated a little second, and scribbled down Virginia Baker.

The three names looked so random, pulled out of the hat together, but Neal couldn't bring himself to close the case as a huge miss-judging from his side. He reached out for his laptop, and opened it. Facebook was a site he very seldom used; he had enough paranoia to avoid social networks all together, but he did have a Chinese profile that was very useful for stalking people down. It was amazing what people put out there in the open, once they got the access.

Hesitantly, he wrote in the first name. Andrea. Several faces showed up, but he didn't recognize any of them. It took him a second to remember the last name. G…R… there were five Andrea Greys there, at least in the top, and Neal pressed the first one. A blonde woman from the UK. The second was a teenager, a kid with that awful pose that was so normal now. Camera over them, boobs squashed together inside a tank top with horrific neckline, a dark shaded fake tan under over-bleached Targaryen hair. Neal got out of there, almost grossed out.

The third however, was a brown haired thirty-year-old, a short haircut and a nice smile. That was the Andrea he remembered. Neal scrolled down the page and found the "employment" section. An ice cream shop, right where he, Ma and Ellen had gone to the park every Saturday. Neal made a huge sigh. _That neither proved or denied anything_, he tried telling himself. _Slim to none still._

Out of curiosity, he didn't leave. He saw through her albums, and laughed at a "Reunion Party". It was weird seeing them all again. That geek that was right under him as valedictorian, she was a black-haired beauty, the _it_ girl was looking like a train-wreck, and so on. He visited a couple of other Facebook's as well, throughout stalking them. He didn't even remember when he stopped and recalled why he was even there to begin with. Neal was about to close his laptop when another thought brushed through him.

Jade Brooks, he typed. And he waited. The internet took a moment to load, but nothing appeared. Nothing. He couldn't lie to himself anymore. Every sixteen-year-old in the world with an access to a computer had Facebook, the ones who didn't were either off the grid or not allowed to. Neither of those were likely to be true, when he thought about it, Ma had never been the one about rules, and Jade Brooks _shouldn't _be off the grid, not if Ma and she weren't relocated somewhere.

It was a hunch, a stupid hunch, but he couldn't find anything to dismiss the theory, and without that, he couldn't get it off his thoughts. Especially when his mind seemed to continue drawing lines between him and her. She was blonde, just like his mother, her techniques matched his and so on. But how could he know for sure that she was his sister? He couldn't contact her, ask her if she was, that would be too weird. Besides, he didn't even know where she was! But… it would be an easy thing to find her, if she had his genes. Neal wrote Virginia Baker down once again, circled around it, and drew a straight line from there. If Jade was Virginia, there was a good chance she would do the same things James Bonds would've done, had he still been a part of the invisible masses.

Well, first of all, he wouldn't just have one alias, he would have several, about five at his disposal at all time, if some of them got blown. He would also have been at the other side of the world right now, lying low doing crimes in another country. He wrote down "Alias" at the end of the line, and circled around it. Another line was pulled out from the name, and he got "Out of the country" down too. But, she was fresh, it was probably one of her first heists, and fleeing the country would be too dangerous for Neal after something like this happening, a too big step out of his comfort zone. He put a question mark around it, and circled it too. He had stayed in New York after the Adler thing.

So she may still be in New York City. That was another wild assumption, but without it, he would have been back to the start, where he was a week ago with Peter. _If_ she still was there, she would have to find somewhere to hide between the masses. School? A new line was drawn, and out from that, another. College? It would be hard to pose as five years older, but not impossible. Neal had been a twenty-two year old grad student about five times himself; colleges were harder to find you in, much more students, much easier to disappear.

College… If she was at college, she was going to find something she could blend in with. Not much help in pretending you were in med-school if you know nothing about medicine. Neal hadn't spoken to his sister since she was one, so he wouldn't know where she was strong, academically, but Neal had got his painting skills from his mother. Art school was drawn out and circled around.

He checked the art schools on the internet, as if he didn't know them all by heart, and started going through them all. It was easy to pull the ones that were ideal for him, most of those were the ones that he had been to before, and they seemed like a better fit than the "Graphic Design" and "Musical Theatre" art departments. A tiny hack he had learned ages ago got him access to the records, and he started going through them, pictures and all.

This took a longer time than he had expected. Late became really late, and night started creeping towards morning when he found her. New York Uni. Her name was Jenny, she was twenty-three, and an art student. Neal wrote the name down, thinking he should've known. Mrs. Kutcher was the woman that owned the corner store outside of his middle school. He rubbed his eyes with the back of his hand and threw a glance at the clock. It was five am, and he had two hours to get some sleep, before he had to wake up and show up at work.

He honestly didn't care. He had enough evidence for himself to take this seriously. Jade was here, in New York, he was almost sure of it. He needed to get in contact with this Jenny kid, just to be sure it was really his sister, somehow without getting her arrested before he got to say his part. His anklet had to be off, so she could trust him and… Neal eyed the Monet some inches away from the names, studied the nice painting while a plan started to form.

***Dramatic outro*Now that Neal knows, will he help her or jail her? And what about Peter and the others at FBI? How will they react? What will be the consequences? What are the odds of loosing? What is Neal's plan? Find out in the next episode of Jade, The Amazing Teenage Thief And Her Older And Also Amazing Thief Brother!**

**Stay cool, and I'll see ya next Wednesday.**


	15. Chapter 15

Chapter 15 - Jade

"You have classes."

The three words from her over-caring roommate, Kimberly, and was getting worryingly usual. This wasn't from the lack of hard work and labor from Jade's side, she was trying as hard as she could to not fall asleep to her alarm, but it was simply _too hard_. She went to classes and had homework to twelve every day, and was expected to wake up at seven the day after, every day? It was absurd, and Jade cursed herself every day for even thinking that attending college was a nice way to hide. But now that she was here, it would be strange if she stopped showing up at classes, it would seem like she had dropped out or something, a rumor she barely had managed to keep away from her from the start.

"Seriously, Jenny, I'm not your mom. Get up, or I'll stop!"

She turned in her bed and moaned, considering getting the gun under her pillow up to make Kimberly stop complaining. Slowly, she forced her eyes open to the light around her. "Sorry," she managed to croak out. Kimberly had a point. She wasn't Jade's mother, and she wouldn't need to do this.

Only one thing was on her mind while changing into something somewhat appropriate, brushing teeth and hair and walking out of her dorm room. _Sleep, sleep, sleep, sleep…_

"Jenny?" She woke up from the monotone steps in the hallway by another pair of shoes, light and jumpy. It took her a second to realize who it was.

"Benjamin?" His smile was so huge of excitement and happiness, she just had to smile too. "What's up with you?"

"Well, I…" He hesitated for a second, probably understanding how little that was going to get into that brain, tired as it was. "What about I tell you over lunch? We could go Subwaying after your classes."

Jade was actually very tired of Subway, she had lost her appetite for it after she lived on it for a week. The same went for all the other normal fast-food restaurants, she would much rather get something varied and different every day, and she could also afford it now. But his smile was so big, and she was too tired to figure out a nice way to tell him Subway made her want to puke, so she just nodded, smiled and said "Sure!"

"Cool, I'll call you around twelve?"

"Yup," She smiled back, and before she knew it, he had skipped away again, bumping into a long-nosed guy on the way out.

Huh. He was awfully chirpy this morning. Wonder what had gone into him. It had been a week and two "half-dates" as Jade liked to call them, lunches didn't really count as date, nor did they count as hanging out, it had been too… romantic to be called that. There had been a lot of getting to know each other and talking, and he had promised her of several occasions that he was going to take her out somewhere epic. She wasn't really sure what he meant by that, the word _epic_ could be so much, but she trusted his judgment that he would take her somewhere she would like.

She was honestly excited to spend time with him, even though it was on a little store some blocks away. She needed something to keep her head out of the lessons, especially the one she was on her way to now. Art history. It wasn't like it wasn't interesting; it was just that she wasn't very fond of her teacher. He was an old guy with a lot of opinions about art that was irrelevant to the subject.

Take the lecture she ended up in as an example. They talked about Goya, he mentioned the awful lot of gothic romantic art that was flowing around in the text books to teenagers. Too grotesque for a sixteen-year-old, he would say, and show Saturn eating his children. And suddenly, they had smashed into a huge monologue about teenagers and the gothic style they had, how it _did not_ reflect the way the gothic artists was thinking in the 1800. And when he finally got back to the century he was going to talk about, he ended up talking about _music_ in the 1800. What did that have to do with anything?

But luckily, the next lesson consisted of painting, and she could do that all day without stop, and with the additional sleep she had gotten from the other lecture, she was doing well. Her teacher even came up to her and complimented her work during the lecture, and she was even happier when she got her phone out after the ended lesson to ask where Ben was.

He was right around the corner, and came skipping along like he had hours earlier, smiling like… What had Mathilda's expression been again? Demi Lovato. That was it. It was a long time since Jade had seen Camp Rock, but she was still seeing the similarities. All his molars were showing, and he had such shiny, happy eyes that she thought they were going to turn into gemstones right there.

The sun was shining, and Subway was just a couple of blocks away, so Jade and Ben walked all the way over, chit-chatting happily about completely normal things. The weather, the Yankees, the spring. She almost felt normal with him, although well… it was all a lie.

But although Jade lived right in the lie, she still was Jade. She was observant and always on edge. She kept an eye behind them, in a radius of what she liked to stalk victims in. A pair of twins Jade ruled out in an instant. She knew they were always out here at this time. A man with a scarf around his neck. A woman with a shirt. The short guy she assumed was a professor the first time she saw him, because of the glasses and weird collection of Hawaii shirts he was wearing. She wondered what he taught in. Another guy with glasses and a characteristic nose. She didn't rule out neither of those, she had seem them on campus, all of them, one of them, the guy in the scarf had classes with her, but they could all be possibly following her…

"How's it going with the history class professor?" Ben cut her thoughts off.

"He's an idiot." She answered. "Used the entire lecture to talk about modern-day culture. And you?"

He smiled that dimple smile on one side. "I got an A on my last project."

"Really? That's amazing!" She grinned along. She hadn't had any evaluations yet, but she was sure hers would go just fantastic. But she didn't say that, instead she asked him if he had put some thought to his bachelor.

"Nah, but that's not until next year. I have a good time to figure that out."

"Yeah, I guess. I feel like my bachelor has to be about something meaningful to me." She shrugged. "I really want to take something cool, something no-one else has even touched… like forgers." She wasn't throwing it out there by chance, she kind of wanted him to know who she really was, not that shell she was creating.

"You want to talk about criminals?" He didn't like the idea at all, she could tell.

"Do you know the amount of skill there is into copying a painting, and, much rather, making people believe it is real?" She drove on. "Some people has to believe it to be real in order to sell it, and there is a lot of talent in some of them."

"Uh-uh," he said, still having quite the negative tone against her. "I'm not letting you do that. Write about objectifying women in naked pictures or something, just don't talk about criminals. They're not worth it."

"I disagree. Helena Jay. Harold Copper. Irina Rudi, Neal Caffrey, Lars Mateni, Frank Henrikson. You know these names simply because they're so great painters, the police, and then the media had to report." Jade hadn't been so talkative since her time under a floor in an old TV station.

"How do you even remember these names?"

"I said it interested me, didn't I?" She smiled shortly, rounding the corner and seeing the SubWay sign ahead. Only scarf guy and the weird professor were behind her now. "Look, telling me that they aren't considered painters, just because they didn't flaw their reproduction with a signature of their own, is like telling me that paintings are just oil splashed on a canvas. Don't even try!"

He laughed a little and playfully bumped into her. "You get very upset about such small things."

She returned the favor. "So do you."

They placed themselves behind the queue that was already lined up inside the shop, still holding a light tone in their discussion. She finally told him that she wasn't very happy for their choice of eating place, and he just smiled, and told her "Wait 'till you've tasted what I order, baby."

Whatever was left of the teenager of Jade squealed at the sound of that, but the food critique of her was getting a little suspicious. What was it she was about to taste?

They sat down with two baguettes and a coke to share when he started smiling again. Jade wasn't really sure what to make out of it. It was slightly creepy, he wasn't usually like this. A little hesitant, she took a bite. And she wasn't surprised. It was just as greasy and icky as the rest of the combinations she had tried. But Jade didn't want to ruin the fun they had, so she smiled and nodded. "You were right," she said after she had swallowed down the sandwich that seemed to grow in her mouth. Hawaii-shirted weird professor was sitting behind them, only with a glass of water in his hand.

"Told 'ya." Ben smiled satisfied.

"So what was it you wanted to tell me?" Jade took another bite, and sucked some coke out of the straw.

He smiled even wider. "Remember you were so sad because we couldn't afford a date?"

Jade felt the hope rising inside her. "Yes…?"

"I got one." Ben pulled out two invitations and handed them to her.

Jade read them between bites. They told her she had invitations to a party for Alana Humphrey, a celebration of her art collections. It seemed highly sophisticated and high class. And it was art. "Where did you get this?"

"My uncle got the invitations, but he is in Spain right now, so he told me to knock myself out. Sent me this in the mail. It's for the weekend." Benjamin smiled widely.

"Wow," she replied, looking up and down the thick paper. "Is it like an exhibition?"

"Yeah, I think so, just with wine and invites only."

"That's awesome!" Jade smiled, reached out and kissed his cheek. "You are awesome."

The short man with the dark glasses stood up and left the small shop.

**Yes, he's Mozzie, if you were wondering.**

**So, asdfghjkl I got my license today, and I'm so HAPPY asdfghjkl! (failed the first time), best feeling EVER! I just had to share that.**

**Well, sure, Jade is oblivious that her brother stalked her down and made it seem like the tickets came from her boyfriend, and that she's in for a surprise, but at least she has a nice date with her boyfriend, right?  
Next chapter is going to be at the party, with Neal and the rest of the FBI there. So, no, Jade isn't the hired thief, she is simply dragged there by Neal, so he can have a chat without being accused of withholding info from the FBI, them finding her using that handy little tracking thing of Neal's ankle, and her running away. It's hard being a CI, Neal, I feel 'ya.**

**There's only like 4 chapters and an epilogue left. I might put some chapters together to one where the POV changes mid-way, because there is things happening on both sides at the same time, and those chapters are a little short…. We'll see.**

**As always, next update next Wednesday.**

**I'm gonna go drive somewhere. Excuse me.**


End file.
